He has the great merit that, opposed as he was to the prevailing Platonism, throughout the Sentences the ethical principle predominates; his excellence is perspicuity, simplicity, definiteness of moral purpose. His distinctions are endless, subtle, idle; but he wrote from conflicting authorities to reconcile writers at war with each other, at war with themselves. Their quarrels had been wrought to intentional or unintentional antagonism in the ‘Sic et Non’ of Abelard. That philosopher, whether Pyrrhonist or more than Pyrrhonist, had left them all in the confusion of strife; he had set Fathers against Fathers, each Father against himself, the Church against the Church, tradition against tradition, law against law. The Lombard announced himself and was accepted as the mediator, the final arbiter in this endless litigation; he would sternly fix the positive, proscribe the negative or sceptical view in all these questions. The litigation might still go on, but within the limits which he had rigidly established; he had determined those ultimate results against which there was no appeal. The mode of proof might be interminably contested in the schools; the conclusion was already irrefragably fixed. On the sacramental system Peter the Lombard is loftily, severely hierarchical.