ed to contain whatever
was necessary or useful for man to know. Questions in astronomy,
geography, chronology, history, or any other branch which had hitherto
occupied or amused the human mind, were now to be referred to a new
tribunal for solution, and there remained nothing to be done by the
philosopher. A revelation of science is incompatible with any farther
advance; it admits no employment save that of the humble commentator.

[Sidenote: Apology of the fathers for Patristicism.]

The early ecclesiastical writers, or Fathers, as they are often called,
came thus to be considered not only as surpassing all other men in
piety, but also as excelling them in wisdom. Their dictum was looked
upon as final. This eminent position they held for many centuries;
indeed, it was not until near the period of the Reformation that they
were deposed. The great critics who appeared at that time, by submitting
the Patristic works to a higher analysis, comparing them with one
another and showing their mutual contradictions, brought them all to
their proper level. The habit of even so much as quoting them went out
of use, when it was perceived that not one of these writers could
present the necessary credentials to entitle him to speak with authority
on any scientific fact. Many of them had not scrupled to express their
contempt of the things they thus presumed to judge. Thus Eusebius says:
"It is not through ignorance of the things admired by philosophers, but
through contempt of such useless labour, that we think so little of
these matters, turning our souls to the exercise of better things." In
such a spirit Lactantius holds the whole of philosophy to be "empty and
false." Speaking in reference to the heretical doctrine of the globular
form of the earth, he says: "Is it possible that men can be so absurd as
to believe that the crops and the trees on the other side of the earth
hang downward, and that men have their feet higher than their heads? If
you ask them how they defend these monstrosities? how things do not fall
away from the earth on that side? they reply that the nature of things
is such, that heavy bodies tend toward the centre like the spokes of a
wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the centre
to the heavens on all sides. Now I am really at a loss what to say of
those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their
folly, and defend one absurd opinion by another." On the question of