7 22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In the second half of the same century this view as to the 

 literal acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by St. Ambrose, 

 who, in his work on the creation, declared that " Moses opened 

 his month and poured forth what God had said to him." But a 

 greater than either of them fastened this idea into the Christian 

 theologies. St. Augustine, preparing his Commentary on the 

 Book of Genesis, laid down in one famous sentence the law which 

 has lasted in the Church until our own time : " Nothing is to be 

 accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that 

 authority than all the powers of the human mind." The vigor of 

 the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing down the cen- 

 turies : " Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis humani in- 

 genii capacitas." 



Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led by no 

 other than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of in- 

 fluential churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for a 

 modification of the accepted view of creation, this phrase held 

 the minds of men firmly. The great Dominican encyclopedist, 

 Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror of Nature, while mixing ideas 

 brought from Aristotle with a theory drawn from the Bible, stood 

 firmly by the first of the accounts given in Genesis, and assigned 

 the special virtue of the number six as a reason why all things 

 were created in six days ; and in the later middle ages that emi- 

 nent authority, Cardinal d'Ailly, accepted in a general way every- 

 thing regarding creation in the sacred books as written. Only a 

 faint dissent is seen in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this 

 later period, who, while giving in his book on the beginning of 

 things a full-length woodcut showing the Almighty in the act of 

 extracting Eve from Adam's side, with all the rest of new-formed 

 Nature in the background, leans in his writings, like St. Augus- 

 tine, toward a belief in the pre-existence of matter. 



At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown 

 in favor of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the source of 

 natural science; the allegorical and mystical interpretations of 

 earlier theologians he utterly rejected. " Why," he asks, " should 

 Moses use allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical crea- 

 tures or of an allegorical world, but of real creatures and of a 

 visible world, which can be seen, felt, and grasped ? Moses calls 

 things by their right names, as we ought to do. ... I hold that 

 the animals took their being at once upon the word of God, as 

 did also the fishes in the sea." 



Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account of 

 creation given in Genesis was Calvin. He warns those who, by 

 taking another view than his own, "basely insult the Creator, to 

 expect a judge who will annihilate them." He insists that all 

 species of animals were created in six days, each made up of an 



