NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 155 



selected through the sevenfold grace of the Spirit; moreover, 

 twelve is produced from, seven that is, the two parts of seven, 

 four and three, when multiplied together give twelve." He also 

 finds deep significance in the number of the apostles ; this number 

 being evidently determined by a multiplication of the number of 

 persons in the Trinity by the number of quarters of the globe. 

 Still, to do him justice, it must be said that in some parts of his 

 exegesis the strong sense which was one of his most striking char- 

 acteristics crops out in a way very refreshing. Thus, referring to 

 a passage in the first chapter of Job, regarding the oxen which 

 were plowing and the asses which were feeding beside them, he 

 tells us pithily that these typify two classes of Christians: the 

 oxen, the energetic Christians who do the work of the Church ; 

 the asses, the lazy Christians who merely feed.* 



Thus began the vast theological structure of oracular inter- 

 pretation applied to the Bible. As we have seen, the men who 

 prepared the ground for it were the rabbis of Palestine and the 

 Hellenized Jews of Alexandria ; and the four great men who laid 

 its foundation courses were Origen, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and 

 St. Gregory. 



During the ten centuries following the last of these men, this 

 structure continued to rise steadily above the plain meanings of 

 Scripture. The Christian world rejoiced in it, and the few great 

 thinkers who dared bring the truth to bear upon it were rejected. 

 It did indeed seem at one period in the early Church that a better 

 system might be developed. The School of Antioch, especially 

 as represented by Chrysostom, appeared likely to lead in this 

 better way, but the dominant forces were too strong ; the passion 

 for myth and marvel prevailed over the love of real knowledge, 

 and the reasonings of Chrysostom and his compeers were neg- 

 lected, f 



In the ninth century came another effort to present the claims 

 of right reason. The first man prominent in this was St. 



*For Origen, see the De Principiis, Book IV, chaps, i-vii et seq., Crombie's translation ; 

 also the Contra Celsum, vi, 70 ; vii, 20, etc. ; also various citations in Farrar. For Hilary, 

 see his Tractatus super Psalmos, cap. ix, li, etc., in Migne, torn, ix, and De Trinitate, lib. 

 ii, cap. ii. For Jerome's interpretation of the text relating to the Shunamite woman, see 

 Epist. lii, in Migne, torn, xxii, pp. 527, 528. For Augustine's use of numbers, see the De 

 Doctrina Christiana, lib. ii, cap. xvi, and for the explanation of the draught of fishes, see 

 Augustine in Johan. Evangel., Tractat. cxxii, and on the twenty-five to thirty furlongs, ibid., 

 xxv, sect. 6 ; and for the significance of the serpent eating dust, ibid., ii, 18. For the view 

 that the drunkenness of Noah prefigured the suffering of Christ, as held by SS. Cyprian 

 and Augustine, see Farrar, as above, pp. 181, 238. For St. Gregory, see the Magna Moralia, 

 lib. i, cap. xiv. 



f For the work of the School of Antioch, and especially of Chrysostom, see the 

 eloquent tribute to it by Farrar, as above. 



