A knowledge of the Bible was assumed to need only an honest heart and God's Spirit, while science, history, and philosophy were regarded as doubtful and dangerous auxiliaries.

But soon after the first reflux of my mind took place towards the Common Understanding, as a guide of life legitimately co-ordinate with Scripture, I was impressed with the consideration that _Free Learning_ had acted on a great scale for the improvement of spiritual religion.

I had been accustomed to believe that _the Bible_[8] brought about the Protestant Reformation; and until my twenty-ninth year probably it had not occurred to me to question this.

But I was first struck with the thought, that the Bible did not prevent the absurd iniquities of the Nicene and Post Nicene controversy, and that the Church, with the Bible in her hands, sank down into the gulf of Popery.

How then was the Bible a sufficient explanation of her recovering out of Popery?
Even a superficial survey of the history shows, that the first improvement of spiritual doctrine in the tenth and eleventh centuries, came from a study of the moral works of Cicero and Boethius;--a fact notorious in the common historians.