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.
The infliction of the death-punishment for difference of opinion was still resorted to.