THE ARREST OF INQUIRY. 75 



soul was created by the direct intervention of the 

 Creator. Augustine's concessions are, therefore, 

 more seeming than real, and, moreover, we find him 

 denying the existence of the antipodes on the ground 

 that Scripture is silent about them, and also, that if 

 God had placed any races there, they could not see 

 Christ descending at his second coming. To Augus- 

 tine the air was full of devils who are the cause of 

 " all diseases of Christians." In other words, he was 

 not ahead of the illusions of his age. Then, too, 

 he shows that allegorizing spirit which was manifest 

 in Greece a thousand years earlier; the spirit which 

 reads hidden meanings in Homer, in Horace, and in 

 Omar Khayyam ; and which, in the hands of present- 

 day Gnostics, mostly fantastic or illiterate cabalists, 

 converts the plain narratives of Old and New Testa- 

 ments into vehicles of mysterious types and esoteric 

 symbols. It is in such allegorical vein that Augus- 

 tine explains the outside and inside pitching of the 

 ark as typifying the safety of the Church from the 

 leaking-in of heresy; while the ghastly application 

 of symbolical exegetics is seen in his citation of the 

 words of Jesus, " Compel them to come in," as a Di- 

 vine warrant for the slaughter of heretics. 



We shall meet with no other such commanding 

 figure in Church history till nine hundred years have 

 passed, when Thomas Aquinas, the " Angel of the 

 Schools," appears, but although that period marks 

 no advance of the Church from her central position, 

 it witnessed changes in her fortune through the in- 



