Strong Alibi by K.C. Turner (electric book reader .txt) 📕

Cyril heard Philammon’s story and Hypatia’s message with a quiet smile, and then dismissed the youth to an afternoon of labour in the city, commanding him to mention no word of what had happened, and to come to him that evening and receive his order when he should have had time to think over the matter. So forth Philammon went with his companions, through lanes and alleys hideous with filth and poverty, compulsory idleness and native sin. Fearfully real and practical it all was; but he saw it all dimly as in a dream. Before his eyes one face was shining; in his ears one silvery voice was ringing.... ‘He is a monk, and knows no better.’.... True! And how should he know better? How could he tell how much more there was to know, in that great new universe, in such a cranny whereof his life had till now been past? He had heard but one side already. What if there were two sides? Had he not a right-that is, was it not proper, fair, prudent, that he should hear both, and then judge?

Cyril had hardly, perhaps, done wisely for the youth in sending him out about the practical drudgery of benevolence, before deciding for him what was his duty with regard to Hypatia’s invitation. He had not calculated on the new thoughts which were tormenting the young monk; perhaps they would have been unintelligible to him bad he known of them. Cyril had been bred up under the most stern dogmatic training, in those vast monastic establishments, which had arisen amid the neighbouring saltpetre quarries of Nitria, where thousands toiled in voluntary poverty and starvation at vast bakeries, dyeries, brick-fields, tailors’ shops, carpenters’ yards, and expended the profits of their labour, not on themselves, for they had need of nothing, but on churches, hospitals, and alms. Educated in that world of practical industrial production as well as of religious exercise, which by its proximity to the great city accustomed monks to that world which they despised; entangled from boyhood in the intrigues of his fierce and ambitious uncle Theophilus, Cyril had succeeded him in the patriarchate of Alexandria without having felt a doubt, and stood free to throw his fiery energy and clear practical intellect into the cause of the Church without scruple, even, where necessary, without pity. How could such a man sympathise with the poor boy of twenty, suddenly dragged forth from the quiet cavern-shadow of the Laura into the full blaze and roar of the world’s noonday? He, too, was cloister-bred. But the busy and fanatic atmosphere of Nitria, where every nerve of soul and body was kept on a life-long artificial strain, without rest, without simplicity, without human affection, was utterly antipodal to the government of the remote and needy, though no less industrious commonwealths of Coenobites, who dotted the lonely mountain-glens, far up into the heart of the Nubian desert. In such a one Philammon had received, from a venerable man, a mother’s sympathy as well as a father’s care; and now he yearned for the encouragement of a gentle voice, for the greeting of a kindly eye, and was lonely and sick at heart.... And still Hypatia’s voice haunted his ears, like a strain of music, and would not die away. That lofty enthusiasm, so sweet and modest in its grandeur—that tone of pity—in one so lovely it could not be called contempt—for the many; that delicious phantom of being an elect spirit, unlike the crowd.... ‘And am I altogether like the crowd?’ said Philammon to himself, as he staggered along under the weight of a groaning fever-patient. ‘Can there be found no fitter work for me than this, which any porter from the quay might do as well? Am I not somewhat wasted on such toil as this? Have I not an intellect, a taste, a reason? I could appreciate what she said.—Why should not my faculties be educated? Why am I only to be shut out from knowledge? There is a Christian Gnosis as well as a heathen one. What was permissible to Clement’—he had nearly said to Origen, but checked himself on the edge of heresy—‘is surely lawful for me! Is not my very craving for knowledge a sign that I am capable of it? Surely my sphere is the study rather than the street!’

And then his fellow-labourers—he could not deny it to himself—began to grow less venerable in his eyes. Let him try as he might to forget the old priest’s grumblings and detractions, the fact was before him. The men were coarse, fierce, noisy.... so different from her! Their talk seemed mere gossip—scandalous too, and hard-judging, most of it; about that man’s private ambition, and that woman’s proud looks; and who had stayed for the Eucharist the Sun-day before, and who had gone out after the sermon; and how the majority who did not stay could possibly dare to go, and how the minority who did not go could possibly dare to stay.... Endless suspicions, sneers, complaints.... what did they care for the eternal glories and the beatific vision? Their one test for all men and things, from the patriarch to the prefect, seemed to be—did he or it advance the cause of the Church?—which Philammon soon discovered to mean their own cause, their influence, their self-glorification. And the poor boy, as his faculty for fault-finding quickened under the influence of theirs, seemed to see under the humble stock-phrases in which they talked of their labours of love, and the future reward of their present humiliations, a deep and hardly-bidden pride, a faith in their own infallibility, a contemptuous impatience of every man, however venerable, who differed from their party on any, the slightest, matter. They spoke with sneers of Augustine’s Latinising tendencies, and with open execrations of Chrysostom, as the vilest and most impious of schismatics; and, for aught Philammon knew, they were right enough. But when they talked of wars and desolation past and impending, without a word of pity for the slain and ruined, as a just judgment of Heaven upon heretics and heathens; when they argued over the awful struggle for power which, as he gathered from their words, was even then pending between the Emperor and the Count of Africa, as if it contained but one question of interest to them—would Cyril, and they as his bodyguard, gain or lose power in Alexandria? and lastly, when at some mention of Orestes, and of Hypatia as his counsellor, they broke out into open imprecations of God’s curse, and comforted themselves with the prospect of everlasting torment for both; he shuddered and asked himself involuntarily—were these the ministers