And when you hear of a system of
reserve in teaching, a disciplina arcani, of an esoteric and exoteric,
an inner and outer school, among these men, you must not be frightened
at the words, as if they spoke of priestcraft, or an intellectual
aristocracy, who kept the kernel of the nut for themselves, and gave the
husks to the mob. It was not so with the Christian schools; it was so
with the Heathen ones. The Heathens were content that the mob, the
herd, should have the husks. Their avowed intention and wish was to
leave the herd, as they called them, in the mere outward observance of
the old idolatries, while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers,
had the monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which were contained
under the old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the
vulgar eyes. The Christian method was the exact opposite. They boldly
called those vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and
there gaze on the very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They
owned no ground for their own speculations which was not common to the
harlots and the slaves around. And this was what enabled them to do
this; this was what brought on them the charge of demagogism, the hatred
of philosophers, the persecution of princes--that their ground was a
moral ground, and not a merely intellectual one; that they started, not
from any notions of the understanding, but from the inward conscience,
that truly pure Reason in which the intellectual and the moral spheres
are united, which they believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in
every human being, capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to
a noble and heroic life.
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