of the flesh, the
lust of the eye and the pride of life were as dross. A master-motive
swayed the minds of sinful men and a zeal to save other souls occupied
the moments not devoted to the perfection of their own. The new
dispensation made any other superfluous. As Tertullian said:
Investigation since the Gospel is no longer necessary. (Dannemann, Die
Naturw., I, p. 214.) The attitude of the early Fathers toward the body
is well expressed by Jerome. "Does your skin roughen without baths? Who
is once washed in the blood of Christ needs not wash again." In this
unfavorable medium for its growth, science was simply disregarded, not
in any hostile spirit, but as unnecessary.(2) And a third contributing
factor was the plague of the sixth century, which desolated the whole
Roman world. On the top of the grand mausoleum of Hadrian, visitors at
Rome see the figure of a gilded angel with a drawn sword, from which
the present name of the Castle of St. Angelo takes its origin. On the
twenty-fifth of April, 590, there set out from the Church of SS.
Cosmas and Damian, already the Roman patron saints of medicine, a vast
procession, led by St. Gregory the Great, chanting a seven-fold litany
of intercession against the plague. The legend relates that Gregory
saw on the top of Hadrian's tomb an angel with a drawn sword, which he
sheathed as the plague abated.

(1) H. O. Taylor: The Mediaeval Mind, 2 vols., Macmillan Co.,
New York, 1911. (New edition, 1920.)

(2) Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 13: "Under their action (the Christian
Fathers) the peoples of Western Europe, from the eighth to the
thirteenth century, passed through a homogeneous growth, and
evolved a spirit different from that of any other period of
history--a spirit which stood in awe before its monitors divine
and human, and deemed that knowledge was to be drawn from the
storehouse of the past; which seemed to rely on everything except
its sin-crushed self, and trusted everything except its senses;
which in the actual looked for the ideal, in the concrete saw the
symbol, in the earthly Church beheld the heavenly, and in fleshly
joys discerned the devil's lures; which lived in the unreconciled
opposition between the lust and vain-glory of earth and the
attainment of salvation; which felt life's terror and its
pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved concrete
infinitudes, and over which