Considering the eminent authority which has been attributed to
the writings of St. Augustine by the religious world for nearly
fifteen centuries, it is proper to speak of them with respect.
And indeed it is not necessary to do otherwise. The paragraphs
here quoted criticise themselves. No one did more than this
Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was
mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office-- a guide
to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of
being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over
the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of
followers; the works of the great Greek philosophers were
stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements
of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of
ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which
there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of
ecclesiastical vengeance.


A divine revelation of science admits of no improvement, no
change, no advance. It discourages as needless, and indeed as
presumptuous, all new discovery, considering it as an unlawful
prying into things which it was the intention of God to conceal.

What, then, is that sacred, that revealed science, declared by
the Fathers to be the sum of all knowledge?

It likened all phenomena, natural and spiritual, to human acts.
It saw in the Almighty, the Eternal, only a gigantic man.

THE PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY. As to the earth, it affirmed that it is