In like manner his
fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his book _The Ant Hill_,
teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, which are said to have horns
and to grow so large as to look like dogs, are emblems of atrocious
heretics, like Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite against
the truth; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out of the
sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use of it,
symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig out the
gold of Holy Scripture and hoard it in their books to no purpose.
This pious spirit not only pervaded science; it bloomed out in art,
and especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles overhanging the
walls, in the grotesques clambering about the towers or perched
upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under archways or lurking
in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic beasts carved upon the
stalls of the choir, stained into the windows, wrought into the
tapestries, illuminated in the letters and borders of psalters and
missals, these marvels of creation suggested everywhere morals from
the Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the Exempla.
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