Not all the Christian bishops, to be sure, took a hostile view of Greek learning. Some regarded the great philosophers as the allies of the Church. Some held that churchmen should study the wisdom of the Greeks in order the better to refute them. Others held that the investigation of truth was no longer necessary after mankind had received the revelation of the gospel. One of the ablest of the Church Fathers regretted his early education and said that it would have been better for him if he had never heard of Democritus. The Christian writer Lactantius asked shrewdly whence atoms came, and what proof there was of their existence. He also allowed himself to ridicule the idea of the antipodes, a topsy-turvy world of unimaginable disorder. In 389 A.D. one of the libraries at Alexandria was destroyed and its books were pillaged by the Christians. In 415 Hypatia, Greek philosopher and mathematician, was murdered by a Christian mob. In 642 the Arabs having pushed their conquest into northern Africa gained possession of Alexandria. The cause of learning seemed finally and irrecoverably lost. The Arab conquerors, however, showed themselves singularly hospitable to the culture of the nations over which they had gained control. Since the time of Alexander there had been many Greek settlers in the larger cities of Syria and Persia, and here learning had been maintained in the schools of the Jews and of a sect of Christians (Nestorians), who were particularly active as educators from the fifth century to the eleventh. The principal Greek works on science had been translated into Syrian. Hindu arithmetic and astronomy had found their way into Persia. By the ninth century all these sources of scientific knowledge had been appropriated by the Arabs. Some fanatics among them, to be sure, held that one book, the Koran, was of itself sufficient to insure the well-being of the whole human race, but happily a more enlightened view prevailed.