‘The women, lad. Do you suppose that they heap priests and churches with wealth for nothing? They have their reward. Do you suppose that a preacher gets into the pulpit of that church there, without looking anxiously, at the end of each peculiarly flowery sentence, to see whether her saintship there is clapping or not? She, who has such a delicate sense for orthodoxy, that she can scent out Novatianism or Origenism where no other mortal nose would suspect it. She who meets at her own house weekly all the richest and most pious women of the city, to settle our discipline for us’ as the court cooks do our doctrine. She who has even, it is whispered, the ear of the Augusta Pulcheria herself, and sends monthly letters to her at Constantinople, and might give the patriarch himself some trouble’ if he crossed her holy will!’
‘What! will Cyril truckle to such creatures?’
‘Cyril is a wise man in his generation--too wise, some say, for a child of the light. But at least, he knows there is no use fighting with those whom you cannot conquer; and while he can get money out of these great ladies for his almshouses, and orphan-houses, and lodging-houses, and hospitals, and workshops, and all the rest of it--and in that, I will say for him, there is no man on earth equal to him, but Ambrose of Milan and Basil of Caesarea--why, I don’t quarrel with him for making the best of a bad matter; and a very bad matter it is, boy, and has been ever since emperors and courtiers have given up burning and crucifying us, and taken to patronising and bribing us instead.’
Philammon walked on in silence by the old priest’s side, stunned and sickened.... ‘And this is what I have come out to see--reeds shaken in the wind, and men clothed in soft raiment, fit only for kings’ palaces!’ For this he had left the dear old Laura, and the simple joys and friendships of childhood, and cast himself into a roaring whirlpool of labour and temptation! This was the harmonious strength and unity of that Church Catholic, in which, as he had been taught from boyhood, there was but one Lord, one Faith, one Spirit. This was the indivisible body, ‘without spot or wrinkle, which fitly joined together and compacted by that which every member supplied, according to the effectual and proportionate working of every part, increased the body, and enabled it to build itself up in Love!’ He shuddered as the well-known words passed through his memory, and seemed to mock the base and chaotic reality around him. He felt angry with the old man for having broken his dream; he longed to believe that his complaints were only exaggerations of cynic peevishness, of selfish disappointment; and yet, had not Arsenius warned him? Had he not foretold, word for word, what the youth would find-what he had found? Then was Saint Paul’s great idea an empty and an impossible dream? No! God’s word could not fail; the Church could not err. The fault could not be in her, but in her enemies; not, as the old man said, in her too great prosperity, but in her slavery. And then the words which he had heard from Cyril at their first interview rose before him as the true explanation. How could the Church work freely and healthily while she was crushed and fettered by the rulers of this world? And how could they be anything but the tyrants and antichrists they were, while they were menaced and deluded by heathen philosophy, and vain systems of human wisdom? If Orestes was the curse of the Alexandrian Church, then Hypatia was the curse of Orestes. On her head the true blame lay. She was the root of the evil. Who would extirpate it?....