[64] advance of knowledge, blocked the paths of science in the Middle Ages, and obstructed its progress till the latter half of the nineteenth century.  In every important field of scientific research, the ground was occupied by false views which the Church declared to be true on the infallible authority of the Bible.  The Jewish account of Creation and the Fall of Man, inextricably bound up with the Christian theory of Redemption, excluded from free inquiry geology, zoology, and anthropology.  The literal interpretation of the Bible involved the truth that the sun revolves round the earth.  The Church condemned the theory of the antipodes.  One of the charges against Servetus (who was burned in the sixteenth century; see below, p. 79) was that he believed the statement of a Greek geographer that Judea is a wretched barren country in spite of the fact that the Bible describes it as a land flowing with milk and honey.  The Greek physician Hippocrates had based the study of medicine and disease on experience and methodical research.  In the Middle Ages men relapsed to the primitive notions of a barbarous age.  Bodily ailments were ascribed to occult agencies—­the malice of the Devil or the wrath of God.  St. Augustine said that the diseases of Christians were caused by demons,

[65] and Luther in the same way attributed them to Satan.  It was only logical that supernatural remedies should be sought to counteract the effects of supernatural causes.  There was an immense traffic in relics with miraculous virtues, and this had the advantage of bringing in a large revenue to the Church.  Physicians were often exposed to suspicions of sorcery and unbelief.  Anatomy was forbidden, partly perhaps on account of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.  The opposition of ecclesiastics to inoculation in the eighteenth century was a survival of the mediaeval view of disease.  Chemistry (alchemy) was considered a diabolical art and in 1317 was condemned by the Pope.  The long imprisonment of Roger Bacon (thirteenth century) who, while he professed zeal for orthodoxy, had an inconvenient instinct for scientific research, illustrates the mediaeval distrust of science.

It is possible that the knowledge of nature would have progressed little, even if this distrust of science on theological grounds had not prevailed.  For Greek science had ceased to advance five hundred years before Christianity became powerful.  After about 200 B.C. no important discoveries were made.  The explanation of this decay is not easy, but we may be sure that it is to be sought in the

[66] social conditions of the Greek and Roman world.  And we may suspect that the social conditions of the Middle Ages would have proved unfavourable to the scientific spirit—­ the disinterested quest of facts—­even if the controlling beliefs had not been hostile.  We may suspect that the rebirth of science would in any case have been postponed till new social conditions, which began to appear in