NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 437 



bodies on the fourth, day by " the harmony of the number four " ; 

 of the animals on the fifth day by the five senses ; of man on the 

 sixth day by the same virtues in the number six which had caused 

 it to be set as a limit to the creative work ; and, greatest of all, 

 the rest on the seventh day by the vast mass of mysterious vir- 

 tues in the number seven. 



St. Jerome held that the reason why God did not pronounce 

 the work of the second day " good " is to be found in the fact that 

 there is something essentially evil in the number two, and this 

 was echoed centuries afterward afar off in Britain by Bede. 



St. Augustine brought this view to bear upon the Church in 

 the following statement : " There are three classes of numbers 

 the more than perfect, the perfect, and the less than perfect, ac- 

 cording as the sum of them is greater than, equal to, or less than 

 the original number. Six is the first perfect number ; wherefore 

 we must not say that six is a perfect number because God finished 

 all his works in six days, but that God finished all his works in 

 six days because six is a perfect number." 



Reasoning of this sort echoed along through the mediaeval 

 Church until a year after the discovery of America. It was re- 

 echoed in the Nuremberg Chronicle as follows : " The creation of 

 things is explained by the number six, the parts of which, one, 

 two, and three, assume the form of a triangle." 



This view of the creation of the universe in six days, each 

 made up of an evening and a morning, as stated in the first of the 

 accounts given in Genesis, became virtually universal. Peter 

 Lombard and Hugo of St. Victor, authorities of vast weight in 

 the Church, gave it their sanction in the twelfth century, and im- 

 pressed it for ages upon the mind of the Church. 



Both these lines of speculation as to the creation of every- 

 thing out of nothing, and the reconciling of the instantaneous 

 creation of the universe with its creation in six days were still 

 further developed by sundry great thinkers of the middle ages. 



St. Hilary, of Poictiers, reconciled the two conceptions as fol- 

 lows : " For, although according to Moses there is an appearance 

 of regular order in the fixing of the firmament, the laying bare of 

 the dry land, the gathering together of the waters, the formation 

 of the heavenly bodies, and the arising of living things from land 

 and water, yet the creation of the heavens, earth, and other ele- 

 ments is seen to be the work of a single moment." 



St. Thomas Aquinas drew from St. Augustine a subtle distinc- 

 tion which for ages eased the difficulties in the case : he taught in 

 effect that God created the substance of things in a moment, but 

 gave to the work of separating, shaping, and adorning this crea- 

 tion six days. 



In the seventeenth century the old view, in exact accordance 



