The simplicity of these great fathers as regards chronology is especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In these, Moses, Joshua, and Bacchus,--Deborah, Orpheus, and the Amazons,--Abimelech, the Sphinx, and Oedipus, appear together as personages equally real, and their positions in chronology equally ascertained. At times great bitterness was aroused between those holding the longer and those holding the shorter chronology, but after all the difference between them, as we now see, was trivial; and it may be broadly stated that in the early Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," it was held as certain, upon the absolute warrant of Scripture, that man was created from four to six thousand years before the Christian era. To doubt this, and even much less than this, was to risk damnation. St. Augustine insisted that belief in the antipodes and in the longer duration of the earth than six thousand years were deadly heresies, equally hostile to Scripture. Philastrius, the friend of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, whose fearful catalogue of heresies served as a guide to intolerance throughout the Middle Ages, condemned with the same holy horror those who expressed doubt as to the orthodox number of years since the beginning of the world, and those who doubted an earthquake to be the literal voice of an angry God, or who questioned the plurality of the heavens, or who gainsaid the statement that God brings out the stars from his treasures and hangs them up in the solid firmament above the earth every night. About the beginning of the seventh century Isidore of Seville, the great theologian of his time, took up the subject. He accepted the dominant view not only of Hebrew but of all other chronologies, without anything like real criticism. The childlike faith of his system may be imagined from his summaries which follow. He tells us: "Joseph lived one hundred and five years. Greece began to cultivate grain." "The Jews were in slavery in Egypt one hundred and forty-four years. Atlas discovered astrology." "Joshua ruled for twenty-seven years. Ericthonius yoked horses together." "Othniel, forty years. Cadmus introduced letters into Greece." "Deborah, forty years. Apollo discovered the art of medicine and invented the cithara." "Gideon, forty years. Mercury invented the lyre and gave it to Orpheus." Reasoning in this general way, Isidore kept well under the longer date; and, the great theological authority of southern Europe having thus spoken, the question was virtually at rest throughout Christendom for nearly a hundred years.