I entreat them not to listen to the hasty sneer to which many of late
have given way, that the Alexandrian divines were mere mystics, who
corrupted Christianity by an admixture of Oriental and Greek thought.
My own belief is that they expanded and corroborated Christianity, in
spite of great errors and defects on certain points, far more than they
corrupted it; that they presented it to the minds of cultivated and
scientific men in the only form in which it would have satisfied their
philosophic aspirations, and yet contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to
ground their philosophy on the very same truths which they taught to the
meanest slaves, and to appeal in the philosophers to the same inward
faculty to which they appealed in the slave; namely, to that inward eye,
that moral sense and reason, whereby each and every man can, if he will,
"judge of himself that which is right." I boldly say that I believe the
Alexandrian Christians to have made the best, perhaps the only, attempt
yet made by men, to proclaim a true world-philosophy; whereby I mean a
philosophy common to all races, ranks, and intellects, embracing the
whole phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitrarily small portion of
them, and capable of being understood and appreciated by every human
being from the highest to the lowest.
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