And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted away, and
perished hideously. Most true. But what if the causes of its decay and
death were owing to its being untrue to itself?

I do not say that they had no excuses for being untrue to their own
faith. We are not here to judge them. That peculiar subtlety of mind,
which rendered the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world,
had with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of alluring them
away from practice to speculation. The Christian school, as was to be
expected from the moral ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far
more slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after
they had conquered and expelled the Heathen school. Moreover, the long
battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of
exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot assert a fact,
without dogmatising rashly and harshly on the consequences of denying
that fact. Their minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness.
Having no more Heathens to fight, they began fighting each other,
excommunicating each other; denying to all who differed from them any
share of that light, to claim which for all men had been the very ground
of their philosophy. Not that they would have refused the Logos to all
men in words. They would have cursed a man for denying the existence of
the Logos in every man; but they would have equally cursed him for
acting on his existence in practice, and treating the heretic as one who
had that within him to which a preacher might appeal. Thus they became
Dogmatists; that is, men who assert a truth so fiercely, as to forget
that a truth is meant to be used, and not merely asserted--if, indeed,
the fierce assertion of a truth in frail man is not generally a sign of
some secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his practical
living faith in it: just as he who is always telling you that he is a
man, is not the most likely to behave like a man. And why did this