PETER, surnamed Master of the Sentences, the son of obscure parents, was born at a village near Novara, in Lombardy, about the beginning of the twelfth century. After receiving his elementary education at Bologna, he removed to France, bearing a recommendation to St Bernard, by whom he was placed at the famous school of Rheims. Attracted to the University of Paris by the eminence of its professors, he became so noted there for his attainments, that he was successively appointed tutor to Philip, the son of Louis le Gros, a professor of theology, and, in 1159, Bishop of Paris. He died in 1164. The chief work of Peter Lombard, and that which gave him his surname, is his *Sententiarum libri quatuor* (Nuremberg 1474), being a collection of sentences or passages from the fathers bearing upon the disputed doctrines in theology. By such a concentrated weight of authority, he attempted to quiet all religious doubts and controversies, and to bind the spirit of free inquiry with the bonds of the church's decisions. A contrary result, however, followed. Failing to reconcile the opposing doctrines, contained in different quotations, the book of *Sentences* readily furnished both matter and occasion for controversies, which its timid and faltering speculation failed to decide. It even expressly started difficulties which it never attempted to settle. Yet this work upholding, both by precept and example, the supreme authority of the church in questions of doctrine, and forming the first complete summary of the theology of the middle ages, was employed in the schools as a manual, and became the text-book of numerous and important commentaries. Its greatest merit, however, consists in its having embodied the intellectual spirit of that age, and laid the foundation of the scholastic philosophy. Some of Peter Lombard's views touching the human nature of Christ have been censured, and sixteen of his articles were condemned by the divines of Paris in 1300.