DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE IN THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS. 39 



the views of men in their communion with nature. The eye 

 no longer rested on the forms of Olympic gods. The fathers 

 of the Church, in their rhetorically correct and often poetical- 

 ly imaginative language, now taught that the Creator showed 

 himself great in inanimate no less than in animate nature, 

 and in the wild strife of the elements no less than in the still 

 activity of organic development. At the gradual dissolution 

 of the Roman dominion, creative imagination, simplicity, and 

 purity of diction disappeared from the writings of that dreary 

 age, first in the Latin territories, and then in Grecian Asia 

 Minor. A taste for solitude, for mournful contemplation, and 

 for a moody absorption of mind, may be traced simultaneously 

 in the style and coloring of the language. Whenever a new 

 element seems to develop itself in the feelings of mankind, it 

 may almost invariably be traced to an earlier, deep-seated in- 

 dividual germ. Thus the softness of Mimnermus* has often 

 been regarded as the expression of a general sentimental di- 

 rection of the mind. The ancient world is not abruptly sep- 

 arated from the modern, but modifications in the religious 

 sentiments and the tenderest social feelings of men, and changes 

 in the special habits of those who exercise an influence on the 

 ideas of the mass, must give a sudden predominance to that 

 which might previously have escaped attention. It was the 

 tendency of the Christian mind to prove from the order of the 

 universe and the beauty of nature the greatness and goodness 

 of the Creator. This tendency to glorify the Deity in his 

 works gave rise to a taste for natural description. The earli- 

 est and most remarkable instances of this kind are to be met 

 with in the writings of Minucius Felix, a rhetorician and 

 lawyer at Rome, Avho lived in the beginning of the third cen- 

 tury, and was the cotemporary of Tertullian and Philostratus 

 We follow with pleasure the delineation of his twilight ram- 

 bles on the shore near Ostia, which he describes as more pic- 

 turesque and more conducive to health than we find it in the 

 present day. In the religious discourse entitled Octavius, we 

 meet with a spirited defense of the new faith against the at- 

 tacks of a heathen friend. t 



The present would appear to be a fitting place to introduce 

 some fragmentary examples of the descriptions of nature which 

 Dccur in the writings of the Greek fathers, and which are 



* On elegiac poetiy, consult Nicol. Bach, in the Allg. Sckul-Zeiiun^, 

 1829, abth. ii., No. 134, s. 1097. 



+ Minucii Felicis Octavius, ex. rec. Gron. Roterod., 1743, cap. 2, 3, p. 

 12,28; cap. 16-18. ]>. 151-171. 



