ut them. In
general they inclined to what is called the pantheistic explanation of
the universe. They believed a supreme God in many different forms to
be embodied in all the things they saw. Even their own minds and
bodies they conceived as manifestations of this supreme power. Among
the Aryans who came to dwell in Europe and along the eastern
Mediterranean this method of explaining Nature was in time changed to
one in which humanlike gods were supposed to control the visible and
invisible worlds. In that marvellous centre of culture which was
developed among the Greeks this conception of humanlike deities was in
time replaced by that of natural law, and in their best days the
Greeks were men of science essentially like those of to-day, except
that they had not learned by experience how important it was to
criticise their theories by patiently comparing them with the facts
which they sought to explain. The last of the important Greek men of
science, Strabo, who was alive when Christ was born, has left us
writings which in quality are essentially like many of the able works
of to-day. But for the interruption in the development of Greek
learning, natural science would probably have been fifteen hundred
years ahead of its present stage. This interruption came in two ways.
In one, through the conquest of Greece and the destruction of its
intellectual life by the Romans, a people who were singularly
incapable of appreciating natural science, and who had no other
interest in it except now and then a vacant and unprofitable curiosity
as to the processes of the natural world. A second destructive
influence came through the fact that Christianity, in its energetic
protest against the sins of the pagan civilization, absolutely
neglected and in a way despised all forms of science.

The early indifference of Christians to natural learning is partly to
be explained by the fact that their religion was developed among the
Hebrews, a people remarkable for their lack of interest in the
scientific aspects of Nature. To them it was a sufficient explanation
that one omnipotent God ruled all things at his will, the heavens and
the earth alike being held in the hollow of his hand.

Finding the centre of its development among the Romans, Christianity
came mainly into the control of a people who, as we have before
remarked, had no scientific interest in the natural world. This
condition prolonged the separation of our faith from science fo