able of
perceiving the true and detecting the false."

Another contemporary, Hippolytus, was indeed unsparing in his
denunciation of astrology. In a treatise of eleven quarto pages,
contained in his "Refutation of All Heresies," he riddled with
merciless logic the vain pretensions of the Greek astrologers. But
he showed that he had no quarrel with a well ordered study of the
heavens, by giving liberal praise to Ptolemy, the ablest of the
astronomers.

_A Universal Teaching_.--In far distant Syria, then a choice realm
in the Church's patrimony, there was at the beginning of the third
century another school of Christian philosophers who joined with
their brethren in West and East in waging war on the same dread
enemy. A Syrian work, called the Book of the Astrologers, has two
quarto pages of excellent quality recounting and scoring the
absurdities of current astrological practices. It is so like
Hippolytus' work that one seems an echo of the other.

Perhaps the most interesting of all these concordant denunciations
is that found in the "Recognitions of Clement," a patristic writing
probably of the third century. Here the treatises on astrology run
to full ten chapters, a sign that the author had abundant knowledge
of the subject. In this work astrology is refuted particularly from
the moral point of view. It is convicted of the double charge of
being fatalistic in its tendency and subversive of all morality.
"Men's conduct," says the author's thesis, "is due to their own free
will and not to the configuration of the planets."

_Golden Age of Patristic Literature_.--So ran on in perfect unity
and harmony the steady flow of patristic teaching. It reached its
climax, as we should expect to find, in the heroic writers of the
fourth century, the golden era of patrology. Lactantius, the
Christian Cicero, re-echoed the voices of the past in pronouncing
astrology the work of demons. An Augustine, the greatest of the
Fathers, confirmed the decision of his predecessors by protesting
against the amalgamation of astrology with the true science of
nature.

So effectual indeed was the opposition to astrology of the earlier
Christian writers, confirmed by the masters of the post-Nicene
period, that the practice came to be regarded by all the faithful as
a superstition and a danger, and continued to be so esteemed down to
the time of the Crusades. Fo