Draper said: [Footnote 64]

[Footnote 64: Page 250.]

"In the annals of Christianity, the most ill-omened day is that in
which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at
that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the
Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea.
In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend
themselves in--as the phrase then went--drawing forth the internal
juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things.
Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with
what result. The Dark Ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy.
Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick
II and Alphonso X, who, standing at a very elevated and general
point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization,
and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had
created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve
the social condition of man."

Of course the man who wrote that either knew nothing at all about a
whole series of triumphs of human intelligence, or else he
deliberately put them out of his mind. One wonders if he had ever even
heard of Dante, of whom more has been written than of any man who ever
lived. Those triumphs of art, architecture, the arts and crafts,
engineering, construction work of the highest genius, the Gothic
cathedrals and the great public buildings, town halls, hospitals,
university buildings, would surely have appeared to him as
representing magnificent intellectual--and social--accomplishments,
had he appreciated anything of their real significance or allowed
himself for a moment to get out of the narrow circle of {505}
interests in which he was unfortunately placed. Our architecture in
his time was cheap; our art absent; our crafts lacked development; our
civic and university architecture of the quarter century before he
wrote was literally a disgrace, and of course Professor Draper could
not be expected to appreciate the achievements of the Middle Ages in
those departments in which his own generation lacked so much.

It is especially striking to take a paragraph of Professor Draper's,
in which he sums up a whole movement, and place beside it a paragraph
of a serious and informed student of the same subject. Professor
Draper inherited the old traditions of lazy monks, living in idleness,
a