SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE BIBLE. 293 



that period Christianity dominated the best thought of Europe, and 

 the tremendous practical problems that confronted the Church for 

 a long time threw everything else into the shade; for a long time, 

 I said, during the early part of this period in especial, when the 

 Church in general seemed to realize its responsibility to win the 

 whole world to its Master, and every individual coming into the 

 Church was made to feel that the Church's work was above everything 

 else in the world. The importance of an exhaustive knowledge of 

 the facts of Nature seemed trifling when compared with questions 

 of character and future life, and making the world feel the power 

 of Christ. Eusebius only expressed the thought of much of his age 

 when he said, speaking of those who pursued the study of physical 

 science, " It is not through ignorance of the things admired by 

 them, but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little 

 of these matters, turning our souls to the exercise of better things." 

 And with that deliberate turning away from such subjects there 

 would come of necessity that indistinctness of ideas about natural 

 things which is fatal to all scientific investigation. Witness these 

 words of Lactantius: "To search for the causes of natural things; 

 to inquire whether the sun be as large as he seems; whether the 

 moon is convex or concave; whether the stars are fixed in the sky 

 or float freely in the air; of what size and of what material are 

 the heavens, whether they be at rest or in motion; what is the mag- 

 nitude of the earth, on what foundations it is suspended and bal- 

 anced to dispute and conjecture on such matters is just as if we 

 chose to discuss what we think of a city in a remote country, of 

 which we never heard but the name." As Whewell, from whom 

 these last two quotations are taken, says, " It is impossible to ex- 

 press more forcibly that absence of any definite notions on physical 

 subjects which led to this tone of thought." 



2. Contributing, without doubt, largely to that indistinctness of 

 ideas, and to the low value put upon physical science, was the mys- 

 ticism common to the early and the mediaeval Church, and to the 

 world at large for many hundred years the mysticism, that is to 

 say, the habit of assigning supernatural agencies to the various phe- 

 nomena of Nature, and of regarding them as subject to the vicissi- 

 tudes of arbitrary will rather than as following out the workings 

 of a consistent orderly plan. There is no need of any attempt to show 

 how fatal such a spirit is to science, nor how that spirit seemed for 

 a long while to dominate the world. " It changed physical science 

 to magic; astronomy to astrology; the study of the composition of 

 bodies to alchemy; and even mathematics was changed till it be- 

 came the contemplation of the spiritual relations of number and 

 figure." That the Church was not, as has been often charged, re- 



