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I entreat them not to listen to the hasty sneer to which many of late
have given way, that the Alexandrian divines were mere mystics, who
corrupted Christianity by an admixture of Oriental and Greek thought.
My own belief is that they expanded and corroborated Christianity, in
spite of great errors and defects on certain points, far more than they
corrupted it; that they presented it to the minds of cultivated and
scientific men in the only form in which it would have satisfied their
philosophic aspirations, and yet contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to
ground their philosophy on the very same truths which they taught to the
meanest slaves, and to appeal in the philosophers to the same inward
faculty to which they appealed in the slave; namely, to that inward eye,
that moral sense and reason, whereby each and every man can, if he will,
"judge of himself that which is right." I boldly say that I believe the
Alexandrian Christians to have made the best, perhaps the only, attempt
yet made by men, to proclaim a true world-philosophy; whereby I mean a
philosophy common to all races, ranks, and intellects, embracing the
whole phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitrarily small portion of
them, and capable of being understood and appreciated by every human
being from the highest to the lowest. And when you hear of a system of
reserve in teaching, a disciplina arcani, of an esoteric and exoteric,
an inner and outer school, among these men, you must not be frightened
at the words, as if they spoke of priestcraft, or an intellectual
aristocracy, who kept the kernel of the nut for themselves, and gave the
husks to the mob. It was not so with the Christian schools; it was so
with the Heathen ones. The Heathens were content that the mob, the
herd, should have the husks. Their avowed intention and wish was to
leave the herd, as they called them, in the mere outward observance of
the old idolatries, while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers,
had the monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which were contained
under the old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the
vulgar eyes. The Christian method was the exact opposite. They boldly
called those vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and
there gaze on the very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They
owned no ground for their own speculations which was not common to the
harlots and the slaves around. And this was what enabled them to do
this; this was what brought on them the charge of demagogism, the hatred
of philosophers, the persecution of princes--that their ground was a
moral ground, and not a merely intellectual one; that they started, not
from any notions of the understanding, but from the inward conscience,
that truly pure Reason in which the intellectual and the moral spheres
are united, which they believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in
every human being, capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to
a noble and heroic life. They concealed nothing moral from their
disciples: only they forbade them to meddle with intellectual matters,
before they had had a regular intellectual training. The witnesses of
reason and conscience were sufficient guides for all men, and at them
the many might well stop short. The teacher only needed to proceed
further, not into a higher region, but into a lower one, namely, into
the region of the logical understanding, and there make deductions from,
and illustrations of, those higher truths which he held in common with
every slave, and held on the same ground as they.
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