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Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led by no other
than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of influential
churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for a
modification of the accepted view of creation, this phrase held the
minds of men firmly. The great Dominican encyclopaedist, Vincent of
Beauvais, in his _Mirror of Nature_, while mixing ideas brought from
Aristotle with a theory drawn from the Bible, stood firmly by the
first of the accounts given in Genesis, and assigned the special
virtue of the number six as a reason why all things were created in
six days; and in the later Middle Ages that eminent authority,
Cardinal d' Ailly, accepted everything regarding creation in the
sacred books literally. Only a faint dissent is seen in Gregory
Reisch, another authority of this later period, who, while giving,
in his book on the beginning of things, a full length woodcut
showing the Almighty in the act of extracting Eve from Adam's side,
with all the rest of new-formed Nature in the background, leans in
his writings, like St.
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