Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/586

560 In the second place, when making a general survey of the early history of the Church in Egypt, we are struck with its intellectual energy and freedom. It had every advantage in these respects to start with. Alexandria was the centre of an old school of learning, where the grammarians pursued the study of the classics, and the rhetoricians preached from texts in Homer, the most venerable of those classics. It was also a seat of philosophical speculation, and here Neo-Platonism grew up side by side with Christian theology. The Jewish scholarship represented by the Book of Wisdom and the teachings of Philo taught people who used the Septuagint to combine its sacred authority with Platonic and Stoic speculations. As a great centre of commerce, Alexandria came under the influences of Rome and Athens, and combined these with Persian and even Indian ideas. The most cosmopolitan of all the great seats of scholarship, this city, when it received Christianity, was prepared to give the new doctrine the freest and most varied treatment. Here it was that the gospel came into contact with the widest, fullest, most energetic thought of the age. The faith that had first appeared among the valleys of Galilee was now launched on the ocean of the world's intellectual life. The inevitable consequences followed. Sometimes it was perverted out of all recognition; at other times, while retaining its essential features, it was enriched by a noble, reverent development of its vital truths. The danger in both cases was that it should become little else than a gnosis, an intellectual system, a Christian theodicy, explaining the universe in terms of God as revealed in Christ. From this fate it was saved in early times by persecution. The dungeon, the torture chamber, and the executioner's sword taught men to take their religion seriously as a matter of life and death.

Egypt was the birthplace of speculative theology, which may be said to have begun with the Gnostics in the first half of the second century. There was Syrian Gnosticism and Asiatic Gnosticism, but neither of these would bear compari-