Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/23

Rh testimony of the great fathers of the Church to the continuance of miracles is overwhelming; but everything shows that they so fully expected miracles on the slightest occasion as to require nothing which in these days would be regarded as adequate evidence.

In this atmosphere of theologic thought, medical science was at once checked. The School of Alexandria, under the influence first of Jews and later on of Christians, both permeated with Oriental ideas, and taking into their theory of medicine demons and miracles, soon enveloped everything in mysticism. In the Byzantine Empire of the East the same cause produced the same effect: the evolution of ascertained truth in medicine begun by Hippocrates and continued by Herophilus, seemed lost forever. Medical science, trying to move forward, was like a ship becalmed in the Sargasso Sea: both the atmosphere about it and the medium through which its progress must be made resisted all movement. Instead of reliance upon observation, experience, experiment, and thought, attention was turned toward supernatural agencies.

Especially prejudicial to a true development of medical science among the first Christians was their attribution of disease to diabolic possession. St. Paul had distinctly declared that the gods of the heathen were devils; and everywhere the early Christians saw in disease the malignant work of these dethroned powers of evil. The Gnostic and Manichsean struggles had ripened the theologic idea that at times diseases are punishments by the Almighty, but that the main agency in them is Satanic. The great fathers and renowned leaders of the early Church accepted and strengthened this idea. Origen says: "It is demons which produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions of the air, pestilences; they hover concealed in clouds in the lower atmosphere and are attracted by the blood and incense which the heathen offer to them as gods." St. Augustine says: "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to these demons; chiefly do they torment fresh-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless, new-born infants." Tertullian insists that a malevolent angel is in constant attendance upon every person. Gregory of Nazianzen declares that bodily pains are provoked by demons, and that medicines are useless, but that they are often cured by the laying on of consecrated hands. St. Nilus and St. Gregory of Tours, echoing St. Ambrose, give examples to show the sinfulness of resorting to medicine instead of trusting to the intercession of saints. Leaders of the Church very