THE CONTINUITY OF SCIENCE 47 



puted, some 490,000 rolls, caught fire from ships 

 burning in the harbor, and perished. This alone 

 involved an incalculable setback to the march of 

 scientific thought. 



. Another influence tending to check the advance of 

 the sciences was the clash between Christian and Pagan 

 ideals. To many of the bishops of the Church the aims 

 and pursuits of science seemed vain and trivial when 

 compared with the preservation of purity of charac- 

 ter or the assurance of eternal felicity. Many were 

 convinced that the end of the world was at hand, 

 and strove to fix their thoughts solely on the world 

 to come. Their austere disregard of this life found 

 some support in a noble teaching of the Stoic phi- 

 losophy that death itself is no evil to the just man. 

 The early Christian teachers held that the body 

 should be mortified if it interfered with spiritual 

 welfare. Disease is a punishment, or a discipline to 

 be patiently borne. One should choose physical un- 

 cleanliness rather than run any risk of moral con- 

 tamination. It is not impossible for enlightened 

 people at the present time to assume a tolerant atti- 

 tude toward the worldly Greeks or the other-worldly 

 Christians. At that time, however, mutual antipathy 

 was intense. The long and cruel war between science 

 and Christian theology had begun. 



Not all the Christian bishops, to be sure, took a 

 hostile view of Greek learning. Some regarded the 

 great philosophers as the allies of the Church. Some 

 held that churchmen should study the wisdom of the 

 Greeks in order the better to refute them. Others 

 held that the investigation of truth was no longer 

 necessary after mankind had received the revelation 



