Hypatia | Page 2

of little use to
masses kept from starvation by the alms of the government, and
drugged into brutish good humour by a vast system of public spectacles,
in which the realms of nature and of art were ransacked to glut the
wonder, lust, and ferocity of a degraded populace.
Against this vast organisation the Church had been fighting for now
four hundred years, armed only with its own mighty and all-embracing
message, and with the manifestation of a spirit of purity and virtue, of
love and self-sacrifice, which had proved itself mightier to melt and
weld together the hearts of men, than all the force and terror, all the
mechanical organisation, all the sensual baits with which the Empire
had been contending against that Gospel in which it had recognised
instinctively and at first sight, its internecine foe.
And now the Church had conquered. The weak things of this world had
confounded the strong. In spite of the devilish cruelties of persecutors;
in spite of the contaminating atmosphere of sin which surrounded her;
in spite of having to form herself, not out of a race of pure and separate
creatures, but by a most literal 'new birth' out of those very fallen
masses who insulted and persecuted her; in spite of having to endure
within herself continual outbursts of the evil passions in which her
members had once indulged without cheek; in spite of a thousand
counterfeits which sprang up around her and within her, claiming to be
parts of her, and alluring men to themselves by that very exclusiveness
and party arrogance which disproved their claim; in spite of all, she had
conquered. The very emperors had arrayed themselves on her side.
Julian's last attempt to restore paganism by imperial influence had only
proved that the old faith had lost all hold upon the hearts of the masses;
at his death the great tide-wave of new opinion rolled on unchecked,
and the rulers of earth were fain to swim with the stream; to accept, in
words at least, the Church's laws as theirs; to acknowledge a King of
kings to whom even they owed homage and obedience; and to call their
own slaves their 'poorer brethren,' and often, too, their 'spiritual

superiors.'
But if the emperors had become Christian, the Empire had not. Here
and there an abuse was lopped off; or an edict was passed for the
visitation of prisons and for the welfare of prisoners; or a Theodosius
was recalled to justice and humanity for a while by the stern rebukes of
an Ambrose. But the Empire was still the same: still a great tyranny,
enslaving the masses, crushing national life, fattening itself and its
officials on a system of world-wide robbery; and while it was
paramount, there could be no hope for the human race. Nay, there were
even those among the Christians who saw, like Dante afterwards, in the
'fatal gift of Constantine,' and the truce between the Church and the
Empire, fresh and more deadly danger. Was not the Empire trying to
extend over the Church itself that upas shadow with which it had
withered up every other form of human existence; to make her, too, its
stipendiary slave-official, to be pampered when obedient, and scourged
whenever she dare assert a free will of her own, a law beyond that of
her tyrants; to throw on her, by a refined hypocrisy, the care and
support of the masses on whose lifeblood it was feeding? So thought
many then, and, as I believe, not unwisely.
But if the social condition of the civilised world was anomalous at the
beginning of the fifth century, its spiritual state was still more so. The
universal fusion of races, languages, and customs, which had gone on
for four centuries under the Roman rule, had produced a corresponding
fusion of creeds, an universal fermentation of human thought and faith.
All honest belief in the old local superstitions of paganism had been
long dying out before the more palpable and material idolatry of
Emperor-worship; and the gods of the nations, unable to deliver those
who had trusted in them, became one by one the vassals of the 'Divus
Caesar,' neglected by the philosophic rich, and only worshipped by the
lower classes, where the old rites still pandered to their grosser
appetites, or subserved the wealth and importance of some particular
locality.
In the meanwhile, the minds of men, cut adrift from their ancient
moorings, wandered wildly over pathless seas of speculative doubt, and

especially in the more metaphysical andcontemplative East, attempted
to solve for themselves the questions of man's relation to the unseen by
those thousand schisms, heresies, and theosophies (it is a disgrace to
the word philosophy to call them by it), on the records of which the
student now gazes bewildered,