can
modify his own organism as absolutely irreligious, the physician being
little better than an atheist, but it affirmed that cures may be
effected by the intercession of saints, at the shrines of holy men, and
by relics. It altogether repudiated the improvement of man's physical
state; to increase his power or comfort was to attempt to attain what
Providence denied; philosophical investigation was an unlawful prying
into things that God had designed to conceal. It declined the logic of
the Greeks, substituting miracle-proof for it, the demonstration of an
assertion being supposed to be given by a surprising illustration of
something else.

A wild astronomy had thus supplanted the astronomy of Hipparchus; the
miserable fictions of Eusebius had subverted the chronology of Manetho
and Eratosthenes; the geometry of Euclid and Apollonius was held to be
of no use; the geography of Ptolemy a blunder; the great mechanical
inventions of Archimedes incomparably surpassed by the miracles worked
at the shrines of a hundred saints.

[Sidenote: Intrinsic weakness of the Patristic system.]

Of such a mixture of truth and of folly was Patristicism composed.
Ignorance in power had found it necessary to have a false and
unprogressive science, forgetting that sooner or later the time must
arrive when it would be impossible to maintain stationary ideas in a
world of which the affairs are ever advancing. A failure to include in
the system thus imposed upon men any provision for intellectual progress
was the great and fatal mistake of those times. Each passing century
brought its incompatibilities. A strain upon the working of the system
soon occurred, and perpetually increased in force. It became apparent
that, in the end, the imposition would be altogether unable to hold
together. On a future page we shall see what were the circumstances
under which it at last broke down.

[Sidenote: It commences by extinguishing Greek science.]

The wonder-worker who prepares to exhibit his phantasmagoria upon the
wall, knows well how much it adds to the delusion to have all lights
extinguished save that which is in his own dark lantern. I have now to
relate how the last flickering rays of Greek learning were put out; how
Patristicism, aided by her companion Bigotry, attempted to lay the
foundations of her influence in security.

[Sidenote: Acts of the Emperor Theodosius.]

[Sidenote: Alexandrian libraries.]

[Sidenote: Library of Pergamus tra