parents, children, helpmates, bound together by laws concerning right
and wrong, and numberless other unseen and spiritual relations.

Surely such a body was not merely natural, any more than any other
nation, society, or scientific school, made up of men and of the
spirits, thoughts, affections of men. It, like them, was surely
spiritual; and could be only living and healthy, in as far as it was in
harmony with certain spiritual, unseen, and everlasting laws of God;
perhaps, as certain Alexandrian philosophers would have held, in as far
as it was a pattern of that ideal constitution and polity after which
man was created, the city of God which is eternal in the Heavens. If
so, may we not suspect of this Alexandria that it was its own fault if
it became a merely physical phenomenon; and that it stooped to become a
part of nature, and took its place among the things which are born to
die, only by breaking the law which God had appointed for it; so
fulfilling, in its own case, St. Paul's great words, that death entered
into the world by sin, and that sin is the transgression of the law?

Be that as it may, there must have been metaphysic enough to be learnt
in that, or any city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, even though
it had never contained lecture-room or philosopher's chair, and had
never heard the names of Aristotle and Plato. Metaphysic enough,
indeed, to be learnt there, could we but enter into the heart of even
the most brutish negro slave who ever was brought down the Nile out of
the desert by Nubian merchants, to build piers and docks in whose
commerce he did not share, temples whose worship he did not comprehend,
libraries and theatres whose learning and civilisation were to him as
much a sealed book as they were to his countryman, and fellow-slave, and
only friend, the ape. There was metaphysic enough in him truly, and
things eternal and immutable, though his dark-skinned descendants were