further his own wicked projects. The new Church, by this act, gained an enormous power; its priests became arrogant, the philosophers were even more persecuted than before, and learning was fast approaching its end. The only scientific work which the Church retained was the “Syntaxis” of Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer, which taught that the earth was the fixed centre of the universe, around which all other heavenly bodies rotated. It also treated of the precession of the equinoxes, the milky way, and the distances of the various bodies in the heavens from the earth; but, as the geocentric theory was clearly taught in conformity with the Bible records and the religious convictions of the people, this system was gradually adopted by all classes of society, and became the recognised authority on astronomy. A furious and important controversy about this time broke out between Arius, the leader of those who retained the original belief in the manhood of Jesus, and Athanasius, the leader of the Christians, who declared him to be divine, which culminated in the celebrated Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, at which it was decided that he was actually god. From this moment not only Arians, but all others who refused to believe in the god Jesus, were savagely persecuted, until, at last, science and learning received their death-blow by the destruction of the Serapion, under the order of the Emperor Theodosius, and the murder of Hypatia at Alexandria. This philosopher was in the habit of lecturing on mathematics at the university, and was so popular that the jealousy of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, was aroused; she was seized by his fanatical followers as she was going to her lecture-room, stripped naked, dragged into a Christian church, and there brained by the club of Peter the Reader, in A.D. 414.