II THE ARREST OF ENQUIRY 69 



had held part of the biological field for above two 

 thousand years, and which still has adherents. Of 

 course Augustine (as do modern Catholics and, here 

 and there, even biologists) excepted man from the 

 operation of secondary causes, and held that his soul 

 was created by the direct intervention of the Creator. 

 Augustine's concessions are, therefore, more seeming 

 than real, and, moreover, we find him denying the 

 existence of the antipodes on the ground that Scrip- 

 ture is silent about them, and also, that if God had 

 placed any races there, they could not see Christ 

 descending at his second coming. To Augustine the 

 air was full of devils, who are the cause of 'all 

 diseases of Christians.' In other words, he was not 

 ahead of the illusions of his age. Then, too, he shows 

 that allegorising spirit which was manifest in Greece 

 a thousand years earlier ; the spirit which reads 

 hidden meanings in Homer, in Horace, and in Omar 

 Khayyam ; and which, in the hands of present-day 

 Gnostics, mostly fantastic or illiterate cabalists, con- 

 verts the plain narratives of Old and New Testaments 

 into vehicles of mysterious types and esoteric sym- 

 bols. It is in such allegorical vein that Augustine 

 explains the outside and inside pitching of the ark as 

 typifying the safety of the Church from the leaking- 

 in of heresy; while the ghastly application of sym- 

 bolical exegetics is seen in his citation of the words 

 of Jesus, ' Compel them to come in/ as a divine 

 warrant for the slaughter of heretics. 



We shal} meet with no other such commanding 

 figure in Church history till nine hundred years have 

 passed, when Thomas Aquinas, the ' Angel of the 

 Schools/ appears. But although that period marks 



