Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led by no other
than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of influential
churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for a modification of
the accepted view of creation, this phrase held the minds of men firmly.
The great Dominican encyclopaedist, Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror
of Nature, while mixing ideas brought from Aristotle with a theory
drawn from the Bible, stood firmly by the first of the accounts given in
Genesis, and assigned the special virtue of the number six as a reason
why all things were created in six days; and in the later Middle Ages
that eminent authority, Cardinal d' Ailly, accepted everything regarding
creation in the sacred books literally. Only a faint dissent is seen
in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this later period, who, while
giving, in his book on the beginning of things, a full length woodcut
showing the Almighty in the act of extracting Eve from Adam's side,
with all the rest of new-formed Nature in the background, leans in his
writings, like St. Augustine, toward a belief in the pre-existence of
matter.

At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in favour
of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source of natural
science. The allegorical and mystical interpretations of earlier
theologians he utterly rejected. "Why," he asks, "should Moses use
allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical creatures or of an
allegorical world, but of real creatures and of a visible world, which
can be seen, felt, and grasped? Moses calls things by their right names,
as we ought to do.... I hold that the animals took their being at once
upon the word of God, as did also the fishes in the sea."

Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account of creation
given in Genesis was Calvin. He warns those who, by taking another view
than his own, "basely insult the Creator, to expect a judge who will
annihilate them." He insists that all species of animals were created
in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, and that no new
species has ever appeared since. He dwells on the production of birds
from the water as resting upon certain warrant of Scripture, but adds,
"If the question is to be argued on physical grounds, we know that
water is more akin to air than the earth is." As to difficulties in the
scriptural account of creation, he tells us that God "wished by these to
give proofs