THE DARK AGES 149 



interpretation of scriptural numbers. Thus Augustine says the 

 science of numbers is not created by men, but merely discovered, 

 residing in the nature of things. 



Whether numbers are regarded by themselves or their laws applied 

 to figures, lines or other motions, they have always fixed rules, which 

 have not been made by men at all, but only recognized by the keen- 

 ness of shrewd people. 



SCIENCE AND THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH. In the earlier 

 centuries of our era the history of science gradually enters upon 

 a new phase. The more highly developed civilization of Greece 

 and Rome, weakened by corruption, has finally yielded to the 

 attacks on the one hand of barbarous or semicivilized races, 

 Goths, Vandals, Huns, and Arabs, and on the other hand 

 to a moral revolution of humble Jewish origin. These changes 

 were adverse to the development, or even the survival, of Greek 

 science. The destructive relation of the northern barbarians to 

 scientific progress may be easily imagined. The policy of official 

 Christianity was based on antecedent antipathy for the unmoral 

 intellectual attitude and the degenerate character which the early 

 Christians found in close association with Greek learning, and on 

 a too literal interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, with their 

 primitive Chaldean theories of cosmogony and the world. 



Justin Martyr, in the second century, says that what is true 

 in the Greek philosophy can be learned much better from the 

 Prophets. Clement of Alexandria (d. 227) calls the Greek philoso- 

 phers robbers and thieves who have given, out as their own what 

 they have taken from the Hebrew prophets. Tertullian (160-220) 

 insists that since Jesus Christ and his gospel, scientific research 

 has become superfluous. Isidore of Seville in the seventh century 

 declares it wrong for a Christian to occupy himself with heathen 

 books, since the more one devotes himself to secular learning, the 

 more is pride developed in his soul. Lactantius early in the 

 'fourth century includes in his "Divine Institutions" a section, 



' On the false wisdom of the philosophers/ of which the 24th chap- 

 ter is devoted to heaping ridicule on the doctrine of the spherical 



