Every diligent reader of ancient literature has encountered, sooner or later, evidences of belief in teleology, the doctrine of the deliberate adaptation of the phenomena of organic life (and even of those of the inorganic celestial system) to some definite end or purpose, as opposed, on the one hand, to the effects of blind chance, and, on the other, to those of a merely automatic survival of the fittest and the elimination of the unfit. Further, from reflection upon phenomena susceptible of teleological explanation, thinkers, both classical and oriental, alike ancient and modern, have not unnaturally passed to a belief that the existence of orderly or purposeful creations necessarily demands the existence of an ordering and purposing Creator.

‘The foundation in the thirteenth century of the two great orders of Franciscans and Dominicans, the latter par excellence the ordo praedicatorum, gave an enormous impulse to preaching.’ It was largely responsible for the abundant production of sermons and arts of sermon-making in the centuries that follow. More than two hundred manuscripts of the period from 1200 to 1500 contain arts of preaching, artes praedicandi. Some have been traditionally associated with the names of certain great Churchmen and Schoolmen, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Albert the Great; we have the names of nineteen authors in the thirteenth century, thirty-six in the fourteenth, twenty-seven in the fifteenth, and as many more manuscripts are anonymous. A glance at Professor Caplan's list of authors on pages 38, 39, of his Hand-List will show that the great majority of known authors were members of an Order.

I am much inclined to agree with Professor Campbell Bonner that ῥητολογἰας in Tatian, adu. Graec. 40, is a ghost-word, and think his emendation, ἀρεταλογίας, a plausible one.