their
original intent.

[Sidenote: Gradual fall into miracle-cure.]

But, noble as were these charities, they laboured under an essential
defect in having substituted for educated physicians well-meaning but
unskilful ecclesiastics. The destruction of the Asclepions was not
attended by any suitably extensive measures for insuring professional
education. The sick who were placed in the benevolent institutions were,
at the best, rather under the care of kind nurses than under the advice
of physicians; and the consequences are seen in the gradually increasing
credulity and imposture of succeeding ages, until, at length, there was
an almost universal reliance on miraculous interventions. Fetiches, said
to be the relics of saints, but no better than those of tropical
Africa, were believed to cure every disorder. To the shrines of saints
crowds repaired as they had at one time to the temples of Aesculapius.
The worshippers remained, though the name of the divinity was changed.

[Sidenote: Closing of the schools of medicine and philosophy.]

Scarcely were the Asclepions closed, the schools of philosophy
prohibited, the libraries dispersed or destroyed, learning branded as
magic or punished as treason, philosophers driven into exile and as a
class exterminated, when it became apparent that a void had been created
which it was incumbent on the victors to fill. Among the great prelates,
who was there to stand in the place of those men whose achievements had
glorified the human race? Who was to succeed to Archimedes, Hipparchus,
Euclid, Herophilus, Eratosthenes? who to Plato and Aristotle? The
quackeries of miracle-cure, shrine-cure, relic-cure, were destined to
eclipse the genius of Hippocrates, and nearly two thousand years to
intervene between Archimedes and Newton, nearly seventeen hundred
between Hipparchus and Kepler. A dismal interval of almost twenty
centuries parts Hero, whose first steam-engine revolved in the Serapion,
from James Watt, who has revolutionized the industry of the world. What
a fearful blank! Yet not a blank, for it had its products--hundreds of
patristic folios filled with obsolete speculation, oppressing the
shelves of antique libraries, enveloped in dust, and awaiting the worm.

[Sidenote: Its deplorable results.]

[Sidenote: Insecurity of the Byzantine system.]

Never was a more disastrous policy adopted than the Byzantine
suppression of profane learning. It is scarcely possible now to realize