s, he reduced the antiquity
of man on the earth by nearly a thousand years, and, in spite of
mutterings against him as coming dangerously near a limit which made the
theological argument from the six days of creation to the six ages of
the world look doubtful, his authority had great weight, and did much to
fix western Europe in its allegiance to the general system laid down by
Eusebius and Jerome.

In the twelfth century this belief was re-enforced by a tide of thought
from a very different quarter. Rabbi Moses Maimonides and other Jewish
scholars, by careful study of the Hebrew text, arrived at conclusions
diminishing the antiquity of man still further, and thus gave
strength throughout the Middle Ages to the shorter chronology: it was
incorporated into the sacred science of Christianity; and Vincent of
Beauvais, in his great Speculum Historiale, forming part of that still
more enormous work intended to sum up all the knowledge possessed by the
ages of faith, placed the creation of man at about four thousand years
before our era.(182)

(182) For a table summing up the periods, from Adam to the building of
the Temple, explicitly given in the Scriptures, see the admirable paper
on The Pope and the Bible, in The Contemporary Review for April, 1893.
For the date of man's creation as given by leading chronologists in
various branches of the Church, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates,
Paris, 1819, vol. i, pp. 27 et seq. In this edition there are sundry
typographical errors; compare with Wallace, True Age of the World,
London, 1844. As to preference for the longer computation by the fathers
of the Church, see Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 291. For the
sacred significance of the six days of creation in ascertaining
the antiquity of man, see especially Eichen, Geschichte der
mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung; also Wallace, True Age of the World,
pp. 2,3. For the views of St. Augustine, see Topinard, Anthropologie,
citing the De Civ. Dei., lib. xvi, c. viii, c. x. For the views of
Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, c. 102, 112, et passim, in Migne,
tome xii. For Eusebius's simple credulity, see the tables in Palmer's
Egyptian Chronicles, vol. ii, pp. 828, 829. For Bede, see Usher's
Chronologia Sacra, cited in Wallace, True Age of the World, p. 35. For
Isidore of Seville, see the Etymologia, lib. v, c. 39; also lib. iii, in
Migne, tome lxxxii.

At the Reformation this view was not disturbed. The same manner of