Orthodox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge of God, for
they lost the knowledge of righteousness, and love, and peace. That
Divine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and further aloft
into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary system of dead
scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their hearts and lives;
and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done before them, filled up the
void by those daemonologies, images, base Fetish worships, which made
the Mohammedan invaders regard them, and I believe justly, as
polytheists and idolaters, base as the pagan Arabs of the desert.
I cannot but believe them, moreover, to have been untrue to the teaching
of Clement and his school, in that coarse and materialist admiration of
celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, as their dogmatic ferocity
ruined Alexandrian thought. The Creed which taught them that in the
person of the Incarnate Logos, that which was most divine had been
proved to be most human, that which was most human had been proved to be
most divine, ought surely to have given to them, as it has given to
modern Europe, nobler, clearer, simpler views of the true relation of
the sexes. However, on this matter they did not see their way.
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