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That work was left for the Christian schools; and up to a certain point
they performed it. They made men good. This was the test, which of the
schools was in the right: this was the test, which of the two had hold
of the eternal roots of metaphysic. Cicero says, that he had learnt
more philosophy from the Laws of the Twelve Tables than from all the
Greeks. Clement and his school might have said the same of the Hebrew
Ten Commandments and Jewish Law, which are so marvellously analogous to
the old Roman laws, founded, as they are, on the belief in a Supreme
Being, a Jupiter--literally a Heavenly Father--who is the source and the
sanction of law; of whose justice man's justice is the pattern; who is
the avenger of crimes against marriage, property, life; on whom depends
the sanctity of an oath. And so, to compare great things with small,
there was a truly practical human element here in the Christian
teaching; purely ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the
simplest and lowest, which gave to it a regenerating force which the
highest efforts of Neoplatonism could never attain.
And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted away, and
perished hideously. Most true. But what if the causes of its decay and
death were owing to its being untrue to itself?
I do not say that they had no excuses for being untrue to their own
faith. We are not here to judge them. That peculiar subtlety of mind,
which rendered the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world,
had with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of alluring them
away from practice to speculation. The Christian school, as was to be
expected from the moral ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far
more slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after
they had conquered and expelled the Heathen school. Moreover, the long
battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of
exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot assert a fact,
without dogmatising rashly and harshly on the consequences of denying
that fact. Their minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness.
Having no more Heathens to fight, they began fighting each other,
excommunicating each other; denying to all who differed from them any
share of that light, to claim which for all men had been the very ground
of their philosophy. Not that they would have refused the Logos to all
men in words. They would have cursed a man for denying the existence of
the Logos in every man; but they would have equally cursed him for
acting on his existence in practice, and treating the heretic as one who
had that within him to which a preacher might appeal. Thus they became
Dogmatists; that is, men who assert a truth so fiercely, as to forget
that a truth is meant to be used, and not merely asserted--if, indeed,
the fierce assertion of a truth in frail man is not generally a sign of
some secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his practical
living faith in it: just as he who is always telling you that he is a
man, is not the most likely to behave like a man. And why did this
befall them? Because they forgot practically that the light proceeded
from a Person. They could argue over notions and dogmas deduced from
the notion of His personality: but they were shut up in those notions;
they had forgotten that if He was a Person, His eye was on them, His
rule and kingdom within them; and that if He was a Person, He had a
character, and that that character was a righteous and a loving
character: and therefore they were not ashamed, in defending these
notions and dogmas about Him, to commit acts abhorrent to His character,
to lie, to slander, to intrigue, to hate, even to murder, for the sake
of what they madly called His glory: but which was really only their
own glory--the glory of their own dogmas; of propositions and
conclusions in their own brain, which, true or false, were equally
heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as watchwords of
division. Orthodox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge of God, for
they lost the knowledge of righteousness, and love, and peace. That
Divine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and further aloft
into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary system of dead
scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their hearts and lives;
and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done before them, filled up the
void by those daemonologies, images, base Fetish worships, which made
the Mohammedan invaders regard them, and I believe justly, as
polytheists and idolaters, base as the pagan Arabs of the desert.
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