The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hypatia, by Charles Kingsley

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Title: Hypatia
or, New Foes with an Old Face

Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6308]
Posting Date: April 8, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HYPATIA ***

Produced by P. J. Riddick

HYPATIA

or

NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE

By Charles Kingsley

PREFACE

A picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much which
will be painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent will
do well to leave altogether unread. It has to represent a very hideous,
though a very great, age; one of those critical and cardinal eras in
the history of the human race, in which virtues and vices manifest
themselves side by side--even, at times, in the same person--with the
most startling openness and power. One who writes of such an era labours
under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare not tell how evil people were;
he will not be believed if he tells how good they were. In the present
case that disadvantage is doubled; for while the sins of the Church,
however heinous, were still such as admit of being expressed in words,
the sins of the heathen world, against which she fought, were utterly
indescribable; and the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for the
sake of decency, to state the Church's case far more weakly than the
facts deserve.

Not, be it ever remembered, that the slightest suspicion of immorality
attaches either to the heroine of this book, or to the leading
philosophers of her school, for several centuries. Howsoever base and
profligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may have been, the great
Neo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was, persons of the most rigid and
ascetic virtue.

For a time had arrived, in which no teacher who did not put forth the
most lofty pretensions to righteousness could expect a hearing. That
Divine Word, who is 'The Light who lighteth every man which cometh into
the world,' had awakened in the heart of mankind a moral craving never
before felt in any strength, except by a few isolated philosophers or
prophets. The Spirit had b