i 4 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



purely theological reasoning : for, just as the seven candlesticks 

 of the Apocalypse were long held to prove the existence of seven 

 planets revolving about the earth, so it was felt that the six days 

 of creation prefigured six thousand years during which the earth 

 in its first form was to endure ; and that, as the first Adam came 

 on the sixth day, Christ, the second Adam, had come at the sixth 

 millennial period. Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, in the second 

 century, clinched this argument with the text, " One day is with 

 the Lord as a thousand years"; hence the view of the early 

 Church, that the world was then in its last period, and that the 

 seventh day — the great millennium — would arrive about the year 

 1000 of our era. What striking consequences this belief finally 

 produced all scholars of mediaeval history know well. 



On the other hand, Eusebius and St. Jerome, dwelling more 

 especially upon the Hebrew text, which we are brought up to re- 

 vere, thought that man's origin took place at a somewhat shorter 

 period before the Christian era ; and St. Jerome's overwhelming 

 authority made this the dominant view throughout western Eu- 

 rope during fifteen centuries. 



The simplicity of these great fathers as regards chronology is 

 especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In these, Moses, 

 Joshua, and Bacchus — Deborah, Orpheus, and the Amazons — 

 Abimelech, the Sphinx, and CEdipus, appear together as person- 

 ages equally real, and their positions in chronology equally ascer- 

 tained. 



At times great bitterness was aroused between those holding 

 the longer and the shorter chronology, but, after all, the difference 

 between them, as we now see, was trivial ; and it may be broadly 

 stated that in the early Church, " always, and everywhere, and by 

 all," it was held as certain, upon the absolute warrant of Script- 

 ure, that man was created from four to six thousand years before 

 the Christian era. 



To doubt this, and even much less than this, was to risk dam- 

 nation. St. Augustine insisted that belief in the antipodes and in 

 the longer duration of the earth than six thousand years were 

 deadly heresies, equally hostile to Scripture. Philastrius, the 

 friend of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, whose fearful catalogue 

 of heresies served as a guide to intolerance throughout the 

 middle ages, condemned with the same holy horror those who 

 expressed doubt as to the orthodox number of years since the 

 beginning of the world, and those who doubted an earthquake to 

 be the literal voice of an angry God, or who questioned the plu- 

 rality of the heavens, or who gainsaid the statement that God 

 brings out the stars from His treasures and hangs them up in the 

 solid firmament above the earth every night. 



About the beginning of the seventh century, Isidore of Seville, 



