interest in it except now and then a vacant and unprofitable curiosity
as to the processes of the natural world. A second destructive
influence came through the fact that Christianity, in its energetic
protest against the sins of the pagan civilization, absolutely
neglected and in a way despised all forms of science.

The early indifference of Christians to natural learning is partly to
be explained by the fact that their religion was developed among the
Hebrews, a people remarkable for their lack of interest in the
scientific aspects of Nature. To them it was a sufficient explanation
that one omnipotent God ruled all things at his will, the heavens and
the earth alike being held in the hollow of his hand.

Finding the centre of its development among the Romans, Christianity
came mainly into the control of a people who, as we have before
remarked, had no scientific interest in the natural world. This
condition prolonged the separation of our faith from science for
fifteen hundred years after its beginning. In this time the records of
Greek scientific learning mostly disappeared. The writings of
Aristotle were preserved in part for the reason that the Church
adopted many of his views concerning questions in moral philosophy and
in politics. The rest of Greek learning was, so far as Europe was
concerned, quite neglected.

A large part of Greek science which has come down to us owes its
preservation to a very singular incident in the history of learning.
In the ninth century, after the Arabs had been converted to
Mohammedanism, and on the basis of that faith had swiftly organized a
great and cultivated empire, the scholars of that folk became deeply
interested in the remnants of Greek learning which had survived in the