What, then, stopped its victorious advance? Why was the scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow for nearly two millenniums before it could regather the elements necessary to its fertility and strength? Bacon has already let us know one cause; Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four causes--obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of temper--and he gives striking examples of each.[9] But these characteristics must have had their antecedents in the circumstances of the time. Rome and the other cities of the Empire had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity had appeared, offering the gospel to the poor, and, by moderation if not asceticism of life, practically protesting against the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of the early Christians, and the extraordinary exaltation of mind which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures to which they were subjected,[10] must have left traces not easily effaced. They scorned the earth, in view of that 'building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.' The Scriptures which ministered to their spiritual needs were also the measure of their Science. When, for example, the celebrated question of antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustin, who flourished A.D. 400, would not deny the rotundity of the earth; but he would deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other side, 'because no such race is recorded in Scripture among the descendants of Adam.' Archbishop Boniface was shocked at the assumption of a 'world of human beings out of the reach of the means of salvation.' Thus reined in, Science was not likely to make much progress. Later on the political and theological strife between the Church and civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle investigation.