148 Epitome of the Progress of JVatural Science. 



formed at length the all-absorbing subject of cultivated minds. 

 Science was no more thought of; even jurisprudence but existed 

 in the shade of the ecclesiastical code, and of canon law. Warmed 

 and hurried on by contention, and the pride of opinion, they 

 overlooked the divine character of the precepts of their faith, 

 and too often preferred to look for God in obscure dogmas, and 

 speculative reasonings. In his works they found him not ; stran- 

 gers to natural theology, nature appears to have existed in vain 

 for them. In their search after truth, they went from the un- 

 known to the known, the reverse of that true method, which 

 experience at length has brought us to : for if the past fourteen 

 centuries have disclosed any great truth to man, it is, that God is 

 to be seen in his works, and that the human mind must seek for 

 truth itself, by proceeding from the known to the unknown. To 

 the extinction of all taste for ancient literature, followed the de- 

 struction of the superb pagan temples, and their libraries. Fana- 

 ticism completed what controversy had begun, and the physical 

 power of the successful faith, was destructively directed against 

 the magnificent monuments of the fallen pagan mythology, and 

 against the ancient classical literature ; as was repeated at a later 

 day by Knox, and other ferocious reformers, when they prevail- 

 ed against the hierarchy of the venerable catholic church. The 

 destruction by fire, of the works of the ancient Greek and Latin 

 writers, was not enough. At a later day, a more curious method 

 was resorted to by the priests, of asserting their power over the 

 fallen literature. Notwithstanding the general proscription of 

 the pagan writers, and which had been carried so far as to in- 

 duce the council of Carthage to forbid all bishops to read pagan 

 authors, some copies of the most esteemed writers had been pre- 

 served : but as the religious poems of St. Gregory, the canticles 

 of St. Augustine, and the effusions of other holy men, were now 

 substituted, — as the habitual poetry of the day, — for the verses 

 of Virgil, Anacreon, Bion, &c., and as the old material, papyrus, 

 became scarce, and parchment was too expensive for many in- 

 dividuals, the contents of the ancient rolls were obliterated, and 

 religious compositions substituted in their place. This practice 

 became still more general in the seventh century, and subse- 

 quently to it, when papyrus ceased to be made, in consequence 

 of the destruction of every thing connected with literature, by 

 the Saracens. It was thus that professor Mai discovered the lost 



