childlike in its intellectual affinities, it will still manage to draw what is like itself. In that case, probably it will not draw directly from the great sources, but from intermediaries who have partially debased them. From these turbid compositions the still duller age will continue to select the obvious and the worse. This indicates the character of Isidore's work. His writings speak for themselves through their titles, and are so flat, so transparent, so palpably taken from the nearest authorities, that there is no call to analyze them. But their titles with some slight indication of their contents will show the excerpt character of Isidore's mental processes, and illustrate by anticipation the like qualities reappearing with the Carolingian doctors.
Isidore's Quaestiones in vetus Testamentum[1] is his chief work in the nature of a Scripture commentary. It is confined to those passages of the Old Testament which were deemed most pregnant with allegorical meaning. His Preface discloses his usual method of procedure: "We have taken certain of those incidents of the sacred history which were told or done figuratively, and are filled with mystic sacraments, and have woven them together in sequence in this little work; and, collecting the opinions of the old churchmen, we have made a choice of flowers as from divers meadows; and briefly presenting a few matters from so many, with some changes or additions, we offer them not only to studious but fastidious readers who detest prolixity." Every one may feel assured that he will be reading the interpretations of the Fathers, and not those of Isidore—"my voice is but their tongue." He states that his sources are Origen, Victorinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Fulgentius, Cassian, and "Gregory so distinguished for his eloquence in our own time." The spirit of the mediaeval commentary is in this Preface. The phrase about "culling the opinions of the Fathers like flowers from divers meadows," will be repeated hundreds of times. Such a commentary is a thing of excerpts; so it rests upon authority. The writer thus comforts both his reader and himself; neither runs the
- ↑ Migne 83, col. 207-424. No reference need be made, of course, to the False Decretals, pseudonymously connected with Isidore's name; they are later than his time.
