HYPATIA

OR

NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE

by Charles Kingsley





PREFACE


A picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much which
will be painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent will
do well to leave altogether unread. It has to represent a very
hideous, though a very great, age; one of those critical and
cardinal eras in the history of the human race, in which virtues and
vices manifest themselves side by side--even, at times, in the same
person--with the most startling openness and power. One who writes
of such an era labours under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare
not tell how evil people were; he will not be believed if he tells
how good they were. In the present case that disadvantage is
doubled; for while the sins of the Church, however heinous, were
still such as admit of being expressed in words, the sins of the
heathen world, against which she fought, were utterly indescribable;
and the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for the sake of
decency, to state the Church's case far more weakly than the facts