146 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



was the scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted 

 soil, to lie fallow for nearly two millenniums, before it 

 could regather the elements necessary to its fertility 

 and strength? Bacon has already let us know one 

 cause; Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four 

 causes obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of 

 disposition, enthusiasm of temper; and he gives strik- 

 ing examples of each.* But these characteristics must 

 have had their antecedents in the circumstances of the 

 time. Eome, and the other cities of the Empire, had 

 fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity had ap- 

 peared, offering the Gospel to the poor, and by modera- 

 tion, 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 dia- 

 bolical 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 Scrip- 

 tures which ministered to their spiritual needs were 

 also the measure of their Science. When, for example, 

 the celebrated question of Antipodes came to be dis- 

 cussed, 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 Boni- 

 face was shocked at the assumption of a ' world of hu- 

 man 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 



* ' History of the Inductive Sciences,' vol. i. 



f Described with terrible vividness in Kenan's ' Antichrist.' 



