8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



moral and spiritual matters, but mere children so far as the develop- 

 ment of their scientific faculties were concerned ; and it is from the 

 scientific faculties that theology, as such, proceeds. Theology is an 

 attempt to define to the understanding the basis of man's religious con- 

 victions and aspirations ; it aims to be the science of God's dealings 

 with man and Nature, and as such it is bound to share the infirmity of 

 the logical and scientific faculty of the times in which it arises. 



The contemporaries of Jesus thought it not unreasonable that John 

 the Baptist should come to life after his head had been cut off ; that 

 the prophet Elias should reappear upon earth, or that Jeremiah should 

 come back. These notions were in strict keeping with the belief in 

 the marvelous and the supernatural that then possessed men's minds. 

 The four Gospels were a growth out of this atmosphere, and the cur- 

 rent theology is a continuation of the same faith in prodigies as op- 

 posed to natural occurrences. The fathers knew little more about 

 the true order of the physical universe than savages. They believed, 

 for instance, the use of the spade made the earth fertile because it was 

 of the form of a cross ; that the sun, moon, and stars shone less brightly 

 since the fall. Irena3us gave, as his reasons for accepting the four Gos- 

 pels and no more, the fact that there are four universal winds and four 

 quarters of the earth, and because living creatures are quadriform. 

 Origen believed that the sun, moon, and stars were living, rational be- 

 ings, capable of sinning, and are subject to vanity, etc., and that they 

 pray to the Supreme Being through his only-begotten Son. Tertullian 

 shared the belief of his contemporaries that the hyena changes its sex 

 every year, being alternately male and female. Clement, of Rome, be- 

 lieved the story of the phoenix, that wonderful bird of Arabia, which 

 was said to live five hundred years ; and when it died at the end of 

 that time, that a worm sprang from its decaying flesh which soon be- 

 came a new phoenix, which forthwith took up the bones of its defunct 

 parent and flew away to the city of Ileliopolis, in Egypt, and laid them 

 on the altar of the sun. The natural philosopher has always taught that 

 "death is a law and not a punishment," but "the fathers taught it is a 

 penal infliction introduced into the world on account of the sin of 

 Adam, which was also the cause of the appearance of all noxious 

 plants, of all convulsions in the material globe, and, as was sometimes 

 asserted, even of a diminution of the lisjht of the sun." How dormant 

 and puerile man's scientific faculties were during the early centuries 

 of Christianity, when the foundations of the science of theology were 

 laid, is well illustrated in a work called the " Christian Opinion con- 

 cerning the World," by the monk Cosmas, of the sixth century. Cos- 

 mas taught that the earth was literally a tabernacle, because St. Paul 

 speaks of it as such, and that Moses exactly copied its form in his tab- 

 ernacle. It is a flat parallelogram, twice as long as it is broad, roofed 

 in by the sky, which is glued to the outer edges of the earth. It con- 

 sists of two stories, in one of which dwell the blessed, and in the other 



