history becomes a revelation of the divine purpose and its
realization. In primitive belief science and religion are practically indistinguishable from each other. The way of the
gods is the way of the universe. The attribution of personal
motives to the gods was primitive man's literal and serious
way of conceiving the government of the cosmos. He believed
himself actually to be living in a world governed by living
and personal powers, an animistic world. The myths which
describe the birth and life of the gods, the creation of
man, the bestowing of the gift of fire are conceived as the
literal and natural history of creation.

Christianity affords a striking example of how theology
incorporates science and natural history into its world view.
For the early Christian Fathers, natural science was interesting
and useful in so far as it illustrated, which it did, the ways
of God upon earth.

"The sole interest [of the Fathers] in natural fact," writes Henry
Osborn Taylor, "lay in its confirmatory evidence of Scriptural truth.
They were constantly impelled to understand facts in conformity
with their understanding of Scripture, and to accept or deny accordingly.
Thus Augustine denies the existence of Antipodes, men on
the opposite side of the earth, who walk with their feet opposite to
our own. That did not harmonize with his general conception of
spiritual cosmogony."[1]

[Footnote 1: H. O. Taylor: _The Medioeval Mind_, vol. I, pp. 75-76.]

All the natural science current, as represented, for example,
in the compilation called the _Physailogus_, is used as
symbolical of the ways of the Lord to man.

The Pelican is distinguished by its love for its young. As these
begin to grow they strike at their parents' faces, and the parents
strike back and kill them. Then the parents take pity, and on the
third day the mother comes and opens her side and lets the blood
flow on the dead young ones, and they become alive again. Thus
God cast off mankind after the Fall, and delivered them over to
death; but he took pity on us, as a mother, for by the Crucifixion He
awoke us with His blood to eternal life.[2]

[Footnote 2: Thilly: _loc. cit._, p. 76.]

History is treated in the same way. Nearly all the histories
written by the early Christian Fathers were written in deliberate
advocacy of the Faith. It was to silence the heresies of
those who attributed to the Church the entrance of Alaric into
Rome that Augustine wrote his fa