Alexandria and her Schools | Page 3

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ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS {1}

PREFACE

I should not have presumed to choose for any lectures of mine such a
subject as that which I have tried to treat in this book. The subject was
chosen by the Institution where the lectures were delivered. Still less
should I have presumed to print them of my own accord, knowing how
fragmentary and crude they are. They were printed at the special
request of my audience. Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed
to publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or
sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but fear)
would be instantly detected, and severely censured: but nevertheless, it
seemed to me that Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could
see the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe what little right
method or sound thought may be found in them, or indeed, in anything

which I have ever written. In the heyday of youthful greediness and
ambition, when the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the
universe, must needs know everything, or rather know about everything,
at once and on the spot, too many are apt, as I have been in past years,
to complain of Cambridge studies as too dry and narrow: but as time
teaches the student, year by year, what is really required for an
understanding of the objects with which he meets, he begins to find that
his University, in as far as he has really received her teaching into
himself, has given him, in her criticism, her mathematics, above all, in
Plato, something which all the popular knowledge, the lectures and
institutions of the day, and even good books themselves, cannot give, a
boon more precious than learning; namely, the art of learning. That
instead of casting into his lazy lap treasures which he would not have
known how to use, she has taught him to mine for them himself; and
has by her wise refusal to gratify his intellectual greediness, excited his
hunger, only that he may be the stronger to hunt and till for his own
subsistence; and thus, the deeper he drinks, in after years, at fountains
wisely forbidden to him while he was a Cambridge student, and sees
his old companions growing up into sound-headed and sound-hearted
practical men, liberal and expansive, and yet with a firm standing-
ground for thought and action, he learns to complain less and less of
Cambridge studies, and more and more of that conceit and haste of his
own, which kept him from reaping the full advantage of her training.
These Lectures, as I have said, are altogether crude and fragmentary--
how, indeed, could they be otherwise, dealing with so vast a subject,
and so long a period of time? They are meant neither as Essays nor as
Orations, but simply as a collection of hints to those who may wish to
work out the subject for themselves; and, I trust, as giving some
glimpses of a central idea, in the light of which the spiritual history of
Alexandria, and perhaps of other countries also, may be seen to have in
itself a coherence and organic method.
I was of course compelled, by the circumstances under which these
Lectures were delivered, to keep clear of all points which are
commonly called "controversial." I cannot but feel that this was a gain,
rather than a loss; because it forced me, if I wished to give any
interpretation at all of Alexandrian thought, any Theodicy at all of her
fate, to refer to laws which I cannot but believe to be deeper, wider,

more truly eternal than the points which cause most of our modern
controversies, either theological or political; laws which