Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/82

70 conceived to be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down, and who approved himself in practical life as a benignant and upright sage, one who could and would "give good advice about earthly matters, was a faithful steward of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and orphans, a righteous and loving man;"—and of Proclus, to whom the golden chain of the Platonic succession descended from the murdered maiden-philosopher Hypatia—Proclus, whom Victor Cousin lauds as the priest of the whole universe by right of having mastered and harmonised all religions, but who, to our lecturer, seems at once the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of declaimers—one who "can rave symbolism like Jacob Böhmen, but without an atom of his originality and earnestness," and can "develop an inverted pyramid of demonology, like Father Newman himself, but without an atom of his art, his knowledge of human cravings." "He combines all schools, truly, Chaldee and Egyptian as well as Greek; but only scraps from their mummies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy the heart and conscience as little as they do the logical faculties." A memorable prayer of Proclus for more light is, however, reverently done justice to by his critic, as the last Pagan Greek prayer we have on record, "the death-wail of the old world—not without a touch of melody"—and not without an affecting likeness to that In Memoriam figure of And then comes the Christian school of Alexandrian philosophy, concerning which Mr. Kingsley, in opposition to the current contempt of the Alexandrian divines as mere mystics, who corrupted Christianity by an admixture of Oriental and Greek thought, avows his belief 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 very 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.'" He contends that what there was of esoteric and exoteric distinctions in their teaching, was not what it was with the Heathen schools, a separate sum of faith for men of culture and for the vulgar herd severally, the kernel for the privileged illuminati, and the husk for the incapable mob; but that, exactly on the contrary, these Christian philosophers 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"—the ground being )and this is the key to the whole) a moral ground, and not a merely intellectual one, and the only prohibition imposed being the meddling with intellectual matters, before the meddlers (to whom the entire moral field was open) had had a regular intellectual training.