Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face by Charles Kingsley (most popular novels of all time .TXT) 📕

she had permitted, perhaps advised, the gift—had intended him to thank them, would they have so carefully concealed their own generosity?.... Be it so, then. But how would he not repay them for it! How delightful to be in her debt for anything—for everything! Would that he could have the enjoyment of owing her existence itself!

So he took the coin, bought unto himself a cloak of the most philosophic fashion, and went his way, such as it was, rejoicing.

But his faith in Christianity? What had become of that?

What usually happens in such cases. It was not dead; but nevertheless it had fallen fast asleep for the time being. He did not disbelieve it; he would have been shocked to hear such a thing asserted of him: but he happened to be busy believing something else—geometry, conic sections, cosmogonies, psychologies, and what not. And so it befell that he had not just then time to believe in Christianity. He recollected at times its existence; but even then he neither affirmed nor denied it. When he had solved the great questions—those which Hypatia set forth as the roots of all knowledge—how the world was made, and what was the origin of evil, and what his own personality was, and—that being settled—whether he had one, with a few other preliminary matters, then it would be time to return, with his enlarged light, to the study of Christianity; and if, of course, Christianity should be found to be at variance with that enlarged light, as Hypatia seemed to think .... Why, then—What then?.... He would not think about such disagreeable possibilities. Sufficient for the day was the evil thereof.

Possibilities? It was impossible.... Philosophy could not mislead. Had not Hypatia defined it, as man’s search after the unseen? And if he found the unseen by it, did it not come to just the same thing as if the unseen had revealed itself to him? And he must find it—for logic and mathematics could not err. If every step was correct, the conclusion must be correct also; so he must end, after all, in the right path—that is, of course, supposing Christianity to be the right path—and return to fight the Church’s battles, with the sword which he had wrested from Goliath the Philistine....But he had not won the sword yet.; and in the meanwhile, learning was weary work; and sufficient for the day was the good, as well as the evil, thereof.

So, enabled by his gold coin each month to devote himself entirely to study, he became very much what Peter would have coarsely termed a heathen. At first, indeed, he slipped into the Christian churches, from a habit of conscience. But habits soon grow sleepy; the fear of discovery and recapture made his attendance more and more of a labour. And keeping himself apart as much as possible from the congregation, as a lonely and secret worshipper, he soon found himself as separate from them in heart as in daily life. He felt that they, and even more than they, those flowery and bombastic pulpit rhetoricians, who were paid for their sermons by the clapping and cheering of the congregation, were not thinking of, longing after, the same things as himself. Besides, he never spoke to a Christian; for the negress at his lodgings seemed to avoid him—whether from modesty or terror, he could not tell; and cut off thus from the outward ‘communion of saints,’ he found himself fast parting away from the inward one. So he went no more to church, and looked the other way, he hardly knew why, whenever he passed the Caesareum; and Cyril, and all his mighty organisation, became to him another world, with which he had even less to do than with those planets over his head, whose mysterious movements, and symbolisms, and influences Hypatia’s lectures on astronomy were just opening before his bewildered imagination.

Hypatia watched all this with growing self-satisfaction, and fed herself with the dream that through Philammon she might see her wildest hopes realised. After the manner of women, she crowned him, in her own imagination, with all powers and excellences which she would have wished him to possess, as well as with those which he actually manifested, till Philammon would have been as much astonished as self-glorified could he have seen the idealised caricature of himself which the sweet enthusiast had painted for her private enjoyment. They were blissful months those to poor Hypatia. Orestes, for some reason or other, had neglected to urge his suit, and the Iphigenia-sacrifice had retired mercifully into the background. Perhaps she should be able now to accomplish all without it. And yet—it was so long to wait! Years might pass before Philammon’s education was matured, and with them golden opportunities which might never recur again.

‘Ah!’ she sighed at times, ‘that Julian had lived a generation later! That I could have brought all my hard-earned treasures to the feet of the Poet of the Sun, and cried, “Take me!—Hero, warrior, statesman, sage, priest of the God of Light! Take thy slave! Command her—send her—to martyrdom, if thou wilt!” A pretty price would that have been wherewith to buy the honour of being the meanest of thy apostles, the fellow-labourer of Iamblichus, Maximus, Libanius, and the choir of sages who upheld the throne of the last true Caesar!’