‘I used to write,’ says his secretary Lucas, ‘day and night in copybooks, what he dictated and corrected on scraps of paper, with two other monks whom he employed in the same work.’ It was in the middle of these labors that death surprised him.” In Abbot Joachim’s time at least, this Eternal Gospel was not a book, but a doctrine, pervading all his writings. Later, in the middle of the thirteenth century, some such book existed, and was attributed to John of Parma. In the Romance of the Rose , Chaucer’s Tr. , 1798, it is thus spoken of:⁠— “ ‘A thousande and two hundred yere Five-and-fifte, farther ne nere, Broughten a boke with sorie grace, To yeven ensample in common place, That sayed thus, though it were fable, This is the Gospel! pardurable That fro the Holie Ghost is sent. Well were it worthy to be ybrent. Entitled was in soche manere, This boke of whichè I tell here; There n as no wight in al Paris, Beforne our Ladle at Parvis That thei ne might the bokè by.