tion.

As a rule, both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction
in chemistry and physics was for a long time discouraged by Church
authorities; and, when its suppression was no longer possible, great
pains were taken to subordinate it to instruction supposed to be more
fully in accordance with the older methods of theological reasoning.

I have now presented in outline the more direct and open struggle of the
physical sciences with theology, mainly as an exterior foe. We will next
consider their warfare with the same foe in its more subtle form, mainly
as a vitiating and sterilizing principle in science itself.

We have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius, Lactantius, and
their compeers, opposed scientific investigation as futile; next, how
such men as Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the multitude who
followed them, turned the main current of medieval thought from science
to theology; and, finally, how a long line of Church authorities from
Popes John XXII and Innocent VIII, and the heads of the great religious
orders, down to various theologians and ecclesiastics, Catholic and
Protestant, of a very recent period, endeavoured first to crush and
afterward to discourage scientific research as dangerous.

Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science, there was
developed something in many respects more destructive; and this was
the influence of mystic theology, penetrating, permeating, vitiating,
sterilizing nearly every branch of science for hundreds of years. Among
the forms taken by this development in the earlier Middle Ages we find a
mixture of physical science with a pseudo-science obtained from texts
of Scripture. In compounding this mixture, Jews and Christians vied
with each other. In this process the sacred books were used as a fetich;
every word, every letter, being considered to have a divine and hidden
meaning. By combining various scriptural letters in various abstruse
ways, new words of prodigious significance in magic were obtained, and
among them the great word embracing the seventy-two mystical names of
God--the mighty word "Schemhamphoras." Why should men seek knowledge
by observation and experiment in the book of Nature, when the book of
Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, opened such treasures to the
ingenious believer?

So, too, we have ancient mystical theories of number which the
theological spirit had made Christian, usurping an enormous place in