452 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
acteristics must have had their antecedents in the circum- 
stances of the time. Koine, and the other cities of the 
empire, had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity 
had appeared, offering the Gospel to the poor, and by 
moderation, if not asceticism of life, practically protesting 
against the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of the 
early Christians, and the extraordinary exaltation of mind 
which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures 
to which they were subjected,* must have left traces not 
easily effaced. They scorned the earth, in view of that 
" building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal 
in the heavens." The Scriptures which ministered to 
their spiritual needs were also the measure of their Science. 
When, for example, the celebrated question of Antipodes 
cume to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate 
court of appeal. Augustine, who flourished A.D. 400, 
would not deny the rotundity of the earth; but he would 
deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other side, 
" because no such race is recorded in Scripture among the 
descendants of Adam." Archbishop Boniface was shocked 
at the assumption of a " world of human beings out of 
the reach of the means of salvation." Thus reined in, 
Science was not likely to make much progress. Later on, 
the political and theological strife between the church and 
civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, must 
have done much to stifle investigation. 
Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding 
the spirit" of the middle ages. It was a menial spirit. 
The seekers after natural knowledge had forsaken the 
fountain of living waters, the direct appeal to nature by 
observation and experiment, and given themselves up to 
the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. 
It was a time when thought had become abject, and when 
the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in 
science, to intellectual death. Natural events, instead of 
being traced to physical, were referred to moral causes; 
while an exercise of the phantasy, almost as degrading as 
the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scien- 
tific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the middle 
ages, magic, alchemy, the Neoplatonic philosophy, with 
its visionary though sublime abstractions, which caused 
* Described with terrible vividness iu Kenan's "Antichrist," 
