Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman Empire, but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals." Enough has been said on a topic to which prominence has been given because it brings into fuller relief the fact that in a religion for which its apologists claim divine origin and guidance "to the end of the world" we have the same intrusion of the rites and customs of lower cults which marks other advanced faiths. Hence, science and superstition being deadly foes, the explanation of that hostile attitude toward inquiry and that dread of its results which marked Christianity down to modern times. While the intrusion of corrupting elements presents difficulties which the theory of the supernatural history of Christianity alone creates, it accords with all that might be predicted of a religion whose success was due to its early escape from the narrow confines of Judaism; and to its fortunate contact with the enterprising peoples to whom the civilization of Europe and the New World is due. 2. _From Augustine to Lord Bacon._ A. D. 400-A. D. 1600. The foregoing slight outline of the causes which operated for centuries against the freedom of the human mind will render it needless to follow the history of the development of Christian polity and dogma--the temporalizing of the one, and the crystallizing of the other. Yet one prominent actor in that history demands a brief notice, because of the influence which his teaching wielded from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. The annals of the churches in Africa, along whose northern shores Christianity had spread early and rapidly, yield notable names, but none so distinguished as that of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 395 to 430 A. D. This greatest of the Fathers of the Church sought, as has been remarked already, to bring the system of Aristotle, the greatest of ancient naturalists, into line with Christian theology. His range of study was well-nigh as wide as that of the famous Stagirite, but we are here concerned only with so much of it as bears on an attempt to graft the development theory on the dogma of special creation. Augustine, accepting the Old Testament cosmogony as a revelation, believed that the world was created out of nothing, but, this initial paradox accepted, he argued that God had endowed matter with certain powers of self-development which left free the operation of natural causes in the production of plants and animals. With this, however, as already noted, he held, with preceding philosophers and with his fellow-theologians, the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It explained to him the existence of apparently purposeless creatures, as flies, frogs, mice, etc. "Certain very small animals," he says, "may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter." Not till the seventeenth century did the experiments