e is something
essentially evil in the number two, and this was echoed centuries
afterward, afar off in Britain, by Bede.

St. Augustine brought this view to bear upon the Church in the following
statement: "There are three classes of numbers--the more than perfect,
the perfect, and the less than perfect, according as the sum of them
is greater than, equal to, or less than the original number. Six is the
first perfect number: wherefore we must not say that six is a perfect
number because God finished all his works in six days, but that God
finished all his works in six days because six is a perfect number."

Reasoning of this sort echoed along through the mediaeval Church until
a year after the discovery of America, when the Nuremberg Chronicle
re-echoed it as follows: "The creation of things is explained by the
number six, the parts of which, one, two, and three, assume the form of
a triangle."

This view of the creation of the universe as instantaneous and also as
in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, became virtually
universal. Peter Lombard and Hugo of St. Victor, authorities of vast
weight, gave it their sanction in the twelfth century, and impressed it
for ages upon the mind of the Church.

Both these lines of speculation--as to the creation of everything out
of nothing, and the reconciling of the instantaneous creation of the
universe with its creation in six days--were still further developed by
other great thinkers of the Middle Ages.

St. Hilary of Poictiers reconciled the two conceptions as follows: "For,
although according to Moses there is an appearance of regular order
in the fixing of the firmament, the laying bare of the dry land, the
gathering together of the waters, the formation of the heavenly bodies,
and the arising of living things from land and water, yet the creation
of the heavens, earth, and other elements is seen to be the work of a
single moment."

St. Thomas Aquinas drew from St. Augustine a subtle distinction which
for ages eased the difficulties in the case: he taught in effect that
God created the substance of things in a moment, but gave to the work of
separating, shaping, and adorning this creation, six days.(5)

(5) For Philo Judaeus, see his Creation of the World, chap. iii; for
St. Augustine on the powers of numbers in creation, see his De Genesi ad
Litteram iv, chap. ii; for Peter Lombard, see the Sententiae, lib. ii,
dist. xv, 5; and for Hugo of St.