Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/202

188 who seems to have caught sight of cherubs and seraphs should suddenly revel in the creation of devils, imps, and animals, real and imaginary. The whole seems an incongruous jumble. This jumble, and much else, Prof. Evans interprets to us, and shows us how all grew naturally out of human thought and aspiration.

The key which he furnishes us to these strange problems presented by mediæval art is mainly the old dogmatic relation between Nature and Scripture. In the early Church the science of Aristotle and his successors was speedily turned into a channel of which they never dreamed. Scientific truth ceased to be studied for truth's sake, but was used to ascertain and illustrate the meanings of the Bible, and to establish the dogmas of the Church. The book of Nature was held more and more to be the counterpart, and therefore the interpreter, of the book of Revelation. The visible creation was held to be a mirror of the spiritual realm. Hence a new and most extraordinary growth, which, while it has been supplanted in our time by the blooming forth of modern science, still shows some lingering blossoms.

Very early in the history of the Church appeared the treatise known as the Physiologus. In this, various objects in Nature were made to interpret and to be interpreted by various passages in Scripture. So successful was this work that there grew out of it great encyclopædias of sacred science, and the historical student still finds in all properly furnished university libraries works of such vast scope as those of Vincent de Beauvais, Thomas de Cantimpré, and Gregory Reysch.

Most important among the early sources of this stream of mediæval thought was Origen. Early in the third century that eminent biblical scholar, profound and prolific, laid down a great doctrine, as follows:"The visible world teaches us concerning the invisible; the earth contains images of heavenly things, in order that by means of these lower objects we may mount up to that which is above. . . . As God made man in his own image and after his own likeness, so he created the lower animals after the likeness of heavenly prototypes."

The main biblical basis for this great statement was found in two passages, one from the Old Testament, the other from the New. The first was the text from Job, as follows: "Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee." This outburst of poetry, from perhaps the most profound poem in human history, was taken as a prosaic statement of truth. The other text was the statement of St. Paul, that "the invisible things of Him from the creation of