The authority thus imputed to the Scriptures was not restricted to matters of a purely religious or moral kind; it extended over philosophical facts and to the interpretation of Nature.  Many went as far as in the old times Epiphanius had done:  he believed that the Bible contained a complete system of mineralogy!  The Reformers would tolerate no science that was not in accordance with Genesis.  Among them there were many who maintained that religion and piety could never flourish unless separated from learning and science.  The fatal maxim that the Bible contained the sum and substance of all knowledge, useful or possible to man—­a maxim employed with such pernicious effect of old by Tertullian and by St. Augustine, and which had so often been enforced by papal authority—­was still strictly insisted upon.  The leaders of the Reformation, Luther and Melanchthon, were determined to banish philosophy from the Church.  Luther declared that the study of Aristotle is wholly useless; his vilification of that Greek philosopher knew no bounds.  He is, says Luther, “truly a devil, a horrid calumniator, a wicked sycophant, a prince of darkness, a real Apollyon, a beast, a most horrid impostor on mankind, one in whom there is scarcely any philosophy, a public and professed liar, a goat, a complete epicure, this twice execrable Aristotle.”  The schoolmen were, so Luther said, “locusts, caterpillars, frogs, lice.”  He entertained an abhorrence for them.  These opinions, though not so emphatically expressed, were entertained by Calvin.  So far as science is concerned, nothing is owed to the Reformation.  The Procrustean bed of the Pentateuch was still before her.

In the annals of Christianity the most ill-omened day is that in which she separated herself from science.  She compelled Origen, at that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea.  In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend themselves in—­as the phrase then went—­“drawing forth the internal juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things.”  Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with what result.  The dark ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy.  Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick ii. and Alphonso X., who, standing at a very elevated and general point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization, and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve the social condition of man.