Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/18

8 moral and spiritual matters, but mere children so far as the development of their scientific faculties were concerned; and it is from the scientific faculties that theology, as such, proceeds. Theology is an attempt to define to the understanding the basis of man's religious convictions and aspirations; it aims to be the science of God's dealings with man and Nature, and as such it is bound to share the infirmity of the logical and scientific faculty of the times in which it arises.

The contemporaries of Jesus thought it not unreasonable that John the Baptist should come to life after his head had been cut off; that the prophet Elias should reappear upon earth, or that Jeremiah should come back. These notions were in strict keeping with the belief in the marvelous and the supernatural that then possessed men's minds. The four Gospels were a growth out of this atmosphere, and the current theology is a continuation of the same faith in prodigies as opposed to natural occurrences. The fathers knew little more about the true order of the physical universe than savages. They believed, for instance, the use of the spade made the earth fertile because it was of the form of a cross; that the sun, moon, and stars shone less brightly since the fall. Irenæus gave, as his reasons for accepting the four Gospels and no more, the fact that there are four universal winds and four quarters of the earth, and because living creatures are quadriform. Origen believed that the sun, moon, and stars were living, rational beings, capable of sinning, and are subject to vanity, etc., and that they pray to the Supreme Being through his only-begotten Son. Tertullian shared the belief of his contemporaries that the hyena changes its sex every year, being alternately male and female. Clement, of Rome, believed the story of the phœnix, that wonderful bird of Arabia, which was said to live five hundred years; and when it died at the end of that time, that a worm sprang from its decaying flesh which soon became a new phœnix, which forthwith took up the bones of its defunct parent and flew away to the city of Heliopolis, in Egypt, and laid them on the altar of the sun. The natural philosopher has always taught that "death is a law and not a punishment," but "the fathers taught it is a penal infliction introduced into the world on account of the sin of Adam, which was also the cause of the appearance of all noxious plants, of all convulsions in the material globe, and, as was sometimes asserted, even of a diminution of the light of the sun." How dormant and puerile man's scientific faculties were during the early centuries of Christianity, when the foundations of the science of theology were laid, is well illustrated in a work called the "Christian Opinion concerning the World," by the monk Cosmas, of the sixth century. Cosmas taught that the earth was literally a tabernacle, because St. Paul speaks of it as such, and that Moses exactly copied its form in his tabernacle. It is a flat parallelogram, twice as long as it is broad, roofed in by the sky, which is glued to the outer edges of the earth. It consists of two stories, in one of which dwell the blessed, and in the other