io6 Science Religion and Reality 



Himself with Creation, He is greater and better than that which He 

 has wrought. Hidden from our eyes, He can only be reached by the 

 spirit. . . . On entering a temple we assume all signs of reverence. 

 How much more reverent then should we be before the heavenly 

 bodies, the stars, the very nature of God ? " 



But the science of antiquity as exhibited elsewhere in later 

 pagan writings contains very little of this belief in man's destiny, 

 this hope for human knowledge. The world in which the 

 Imperial Roman lived was a finite world bound by the firmament 

 and limited by a flaming rampart. His fathers had thought that 

 gfeat space peopled by numina, " divinities " that needed to be 

 propitiated. The new dispensation — the lex naturae of the world 

 that had so many parallels with the jus gentium of the Empire — 

 had now taken the place of those awesome beings. 



In the inevitableness of the action of that law Lucretius the 

 Epicurean might find comfort from the unknown terror. Yet 

 for the Stoic it must have remained a cruel law. His vision, we 

 must remember, was very different from that given by the spacious 

 claim of modern science which explores into ever wider and wider 

 regions of space and time and thought. It was an iron, nerveless, 

 tyrannical universe which science had raised and in which man 

 felt himself fettered, imprisoned, crushed. The Roman had for- 

 saken his early gods, that crowd of strangely vague yet personal 

 beings whose ceremonial propitiation in every event and circumstance 

 had filled his fathers' lives. He had had before him an alternative 

 of the oriental cults whose gods were but mad magicians — ^a 

 religion unworthy of a philosopher — and the new religion of science 

 whose god, he now sadly saw, worked by a mechanical rule. He 

 had abandoned the faith of his fathers and had flung himself into 

 the arms of what he believed to be a lovelier goddess, and lo ! he 

 was embracing a machine ! His soul recoiled and he fled into 

 Christianity. Science had induced that essential pessimism which 

 clouds the thought of later antiquity. It was reaction against 

 this pessimism which led to the great spiritual changes in the 

 midst of which antiquity went up in flames and smoke. 



7. Later Jewish and Early Christian Thought. The Influence 

 of Hellenism 



In the earlier books of the Old Testament there is, as we have 

 seen, no conception of natural law. Natural phenomena and 



