Hypatia by Charles Kingsley (phonics story books txt) 📖

Cyril was walking up and down, according to his custom, with great strides. When he saw who was his visitor, he stopped short with a look of fierce inquiry. Raphael entered on business at once, with a cold calm voice.

‘You know me, doubtless; and you know what I was. I am now a Christian catechumen. I come to make such restitution as I can for certain past ill-deeds done in this city. You will find among these papers the trust-deeds for such a yearly sum of money as will enable you to hire a house of refuge for a hundred fallen women, and give such dowries to thirty of them yearly as will enable them to find suitable husbands. I have set down every detail of my plan. On its exact fulfilment depends the continuance of my gift.’

Cyril took the document eagerly, and was breaking out with some commonplace about pious benevolence, when the Jew stopped him.

‘Your Holiness’s compliments are unnecessary. It is to your office, not to yourself, that this business relates.’

Cyril, whose conscience was ill enough at ease that morning, felt abashed before Raphael’s dry and quiet manner, which bespoke, as he well knew, reproof more severe than all open upbraidings. So looking down, not without something like a blush, he ran his eye hastily over the paper; and then said, in his blandest tone-

‘My brother will forgive me for remarking, that while I acknowledge his perfect right to dispose of his charities as he will, it is somewhat startling to me, as Metropolitan of Egypt to find not only the Abbot Isidore of Pelusium, but the secular Defender of the Plebs, a civil officer, implicated, too, in the late conspiracy, associated with me as co-trustees.’

‘I have taken the advice of more than one Christian bishop on the matter. I acknowledge your authority by my presence here. If the Scriptures say rightly, the civil magistrates are as much God’s ministers as you; and I am therefore bound to acknowledge their authority also. I should have preferred associating the Prefect with you in the trust: but as your dissensions with the present occupant of that post might have crippled my scheme, I have named the Defender of the Plebs, and have already put into his hands a copy of this document. Another copy has been sent to Isidore, who is empowered to receive all moneys from my Jewish bankers in Pelusium.’

‘You doubt, then, either my ability or my honesty?’ said Cyril, who was becoming somewhat nettled.

‘If your Holiness dislikes my offer, it is easy to omit your name in the deed. One word more. If you deliver up to justice the murderers of my friend Hypatia, I double my bequest on the spot.’

Cyril burst out instantly—

‘Thy money perish with thee! Do you presume to bribe me into delivering up my children to the tyrant?’

‘I offer to give you the means of showing more mercy, provided that you will first do simple justice.’

‘Justice?’ cried Cyril. ‘Justice? If it be just that Peter should die, sir, see first whether it was not just that Hypatia should die. Not that I compassed it. As I live, I would have given my own right hand that this had not happened! But now that it is done—let those who talk of justice look first in which scale of the balance it lies! Do you fancy, sir, that the people do not know their enemies from their friends? Do you fancy that they are to sit with folded hands, while a pedant makes common cause with a profligate, to drag them back again into the very black gulf of outer darkness, ignorance, brutal lust, grinding slavery, from which the Son of God died to free them, from which they are painfully and slowly struggling upward to the light of day? You, sir, if you be a Christian catechumen, should know for yourself what would have been the fate of Alexandria had the devil’s plot of two days since succeeded. What if the people struck too fiercely? They struck in the right place. What if they have given the reins to passions fit only for heathens? Recollect the centuries of heathendom which bred those passions in them, and blame not my teaching, but the teaching of their forefathers. That very Peter …. What if he have for once given place to the devil, and avenged where he should have forgiven? Has he no memories which may excuse him for fancying, in a just paroxysm of dread, that idolatry and falsehood must be crushed at any risk?—He who counts back for now three hundred years, in persecution after persecution, martyrs, sir! martyrs—if you know what that word implies—of his own blood and kin; who, when he was but a seven years’ boy, saw his own father made a sightless cripple to this day, and his elder sister, a consecrated nun, devoured alive by swine in the open streets, at the hands of those who supported the very philosophy, the very gods, which Hypatia attempted yesterday to restore. God shall judge such a man; not I, nor you!’

‘Let God judge him, then, by delivering him to God’s minister.’

‘God’s minister? That heathen and apostate Prefect? When he has expiated his apostasy by penance, and returned publicly to the bosom of the Church, it will be time enough to obey him: till then he is the minister of none but the devil. And no ecclesiastic shall suffer at the tribunal of an infidel. Holy Writ forbids us to go to law before the unjust.—Let the world say of me what it will. I defy it and its rulers. I have to establish the kingdom of God in this city, and do it I will, knowing that other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Christ.’

‘Wherefore you proceed to lay it afresh. A curious method of proving that it is laid already.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Cyril angrily.

‘Simply that God’s kingdom, if it exist at all, must be a sort of kingdom, considering Who is The King of it, which would have established itself without your help some time since; probably, indeed, if the Scriptures of my Jewish forefathers are to be believed, before the foundation of the world; and that your business was to believe that God was King of Alexandria, and had put the Roman law there to crucify all murderers, ecclesiastics included, and that crucified they must be accordingly, as high as Haman himself.’

‘I will hear no more of this, sir! I am responsible to God alone, and not to you: let it he enough that by virtue of the authority committed to me, I shall cut off these men from the Church of God, by solemn excommunication, for three years to come.’

‘They are not cut off, then, it seems, as yet?’

‘I tell you, sir, that I shall cut them off! Do you come here to doubt my word?’

‘Not in the least, most august sir. But I should have fancied that, according to my carnal notions of God’s Kingdom and The Church, they had cut off themselves most effectually already, from the moment when they cast away the Spirit of God, and took to themselves the spirit of murder and cruelty; and that all which your most just and laudable excommunication could effect, would be to inform the public of that fact. However, farewell! My money shall be forthcoming in due time; and that is the most important matter between us at this moment. As for your client Peter and his fellows, perhaps the most fearful punishment which can befall them, is to go on as they have begun. I only hope that you will not follow in the same direction.’

‘I?’ cried Cyril, trembling with rage.

‘Really I wish your Holiness well when I say so. If my notions seem to you somewhat secular, yours—forgive me—seem to the somewhat atheistic; and I advise you honestly to take care lest while you are busy trying to establish God’s kingdom, you forget what it is like, by shutting your eyes to those of its laws which are established already. I have no doubt that with your Holiness’s great powers you will succeed in establishing something. My only dread is, that when it is established, you should discover to your horror that it is the devil’s kingdom and not God’s.’

And without waiting for an answer, Raphael bowed himself out of the august presence, and sailing for Berenice that very day, with Eudaimon and his negro wife, went to his own place; there to labour and to succour, a sad and stern, and yet a loving and a much-loved man, for many a year to come.

And now we will leave Alexandria also, and taking a forward leap of some twenty years, see how all other persons mentioned in this history went, likewise, each to his own place.

...............

A little more than twenty years after, the wisest and holiest man in the East was writing of Cyril, just deceased—

‘His death made those who survived him joyful; but it grieved most probably the dead; and there is cause to fear, lest, finding his presence too troublesome, they should send him back to us …. May it come to pass, by your prayers, that he may obtain mercy and forgiveness, that the immeasurable grace of God may prevail over his wickedness! ....’

So wrote Theodoret in days when men had not yet intercalated into Holy Writ that line of an obscure modern hymn, which proclaims to man the good news that ‘There is no repentance in the grave.’ Let that be as it may, Cyril has gone to his own place. What that place is in history is but too well known. What it is in the sight of Him unto whom all live for ever, is no concern of ours. May He whose mercy is over all His works, have mercy upon all, whether orthodox or unorthodox, Papist or Protestant, who, like Cyril, begin by lying for the cause of truth; and setting off upon that evil road, arrive surely, with the Scribes and Pharisees of old, sooner or later at their own place!

True, he and his monks had conquered; but Hypatia did not die unavenged. In the hour of that unrighteous victory, the Church of Alexandria received a deadly wound. It had admitted and sanctioned those habits of doing evil that good may come, of pious intrigue, and at last of open persecution, which are certain to creep in wheresoever men attempt to set up a merely religious empire, independent of human relationships and civil laws; to ‘establish,’ in short, a ‘theocracy,’ and by that very act confess their secret disbelief that God is ruling already. And the Egyptian Church grew, year by year, more lawless and inhuman. Freed from enemies without, and from the union which fear compels, it turned its ferocity inward, to prey on its own vitals, and to tear itself in pieces by a voluntary suicide, with mutual anathemas and exclusions, till it ended as a mere chaos of idolatrous sects, persecuting each other for metaphysical propositions, which, true or false, were equally heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as watch- words of division. Orthodox or unorthodox, they knew not God, for they knew neither righteousness, nor love, nor peace …. They ‘hated their brethren, and walked on still in darkness, not knowing whither they were going’ .... till Amrou and his