New books
While educators of the world are realizing the need of a change in methods, it is time for them to see also the need of a change in subject matter and text-books. Protestants in particular should arouse to the times. If the study of paganism, instead of Christianity or truth, produced the Dark Ages, and if wrong methods held the minds of men and prolonged that darkness, forbidding the shining of the light, it is time for both methods and material to be reconstructed in the schools of to-day.
Science in the papal schools
We can with profit notice the attitude of the papal schools toward some of the sciences, taking for example that most practical of modern branches, the science of medicine. What was the work of the physician during the Dark Ages? Draper says: “Physicians were viewed by the church with dislike, and regarded as atheists by the people, who held firmly to the lessons they had been taught, that cures must be wrought by relics of martyrs and bones of saints, by prayers and intercessions.”[92]
True healing forsaken
It is well to remember that Christ was the Great Physician, healing not only soul maladies, but physical infirmities as well; and to the apostles was given the commission to heal the sick and restore sight to the blind. Gradually, however, as the power of the gospel in its purity was lost by the substitution of error for truth, the leaders of the church introduced miracle cures, and preached the efficacy of the bones of saints, etc., in the cure of disease. This became popular, and increased throughout the Dark Ages.
Medical study discouraged
Draper describes the fanaticism of the monastic schools, and finally assigns a reason for the exclusion from them of the study of physiology and anatomy and the science of medicine. “The body,” he says, “was under some spiritual charge,—the first joint of the right thumb being in the care of God the Father, the second under that of the blessed Virgin, and so on of other parts. For each disease there was a saint. A man with sore eyes must invoke St. Clara, but if it were an inflammation elsewhere, he must turn to St. Anthony.... For the propitiation of these celestial beings it was necessary that fees should be paid, and thus the practice of imposture—medicine became a great source of profit. In all this there was no other intention than that of extracting money.”[93]
Doctors in secret
While such was the teachings of the papacy, the Jews and Mohammedans were achieving wonderful success, and making discoveries of lasting benefit to mankind in Spain and Asia Minor. “Bishops, princes, kings, and popes had each in private his Hebrew doctor; though all understood that he was a contraband luxury, in many countries pointedly and absolutely prohibited by the law. In the eleventh century nearly all the physicians in Europe were Jews.” One reason for this was: “The church would tolerate no interference with her spiritual methods of treating disease, which formed one of her most productive sources of gain; and the study of medicine had been formally introduced into the rabbinical schools.”[94]