The paragraphs here quoted criticise themselves.

No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man.

The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the great Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance.
A divine revelation of science admits of no improvement, no change, no advance.

It discourages as needless, and indeed as presumptuous, all new discovery, considering it as an unlawful prying into things which it was the intention of God to conceal.
What, then, is that sacred, that revealed science, declared by the Fathers to be the sum of all knowledge?
It likened all phenomena, natural and spiritual, to human acts.

It saw in the Almighty, the Eternal, only a gigantic man.
THE PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY.