as well as from the degradation of that Jewish
nation whichhad been for ages the great witness for those ideas; and
all classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed, 'the old Adam'
in every man and in every age--were shifting the blame of sin from their
own consciences to human relationships and duties--and therein, to the
God who had appointed them; and saying as of old, '_The woman whom thou
gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat._' The
passionate Eastern character, like all weak ones, found total abstinence
easier than temperance, religious thought more pleasant than godly
action; and a monastic world grew up all over the East, of such vastness
that in Egypt it was said to rival in numbers the lay population,
producing, with an enormous decrease in the actual amount of moral
evil, an equally great enervation and decrease of the population. Such
a people could offer no resistance to the steadily-increasing tyranny of
the Eastern Empire. In vain did such men as Chrysostom and Basil oppose
their personal influence to the hideous intrigues and villainies of the
Byzantine court; the ever-downward career of Eastern Christianity went
on unchecked for two more miserable centuries, side by side with the
upward development of the Western Church; and, while the successors
of the great Saint Gregory were converting and civilising a new-born
Europe, the Churches of the East were vanishing before Mohammedan
invaders, strong by living trust in that living God, whom the
Christians, while they hated and persecuted each other for arguments
about Him, were denying and blaspheming in every action of their lives.

But at the period whereof this story treats, the Graeco-Eastern mind
was still in the middle of its great work. That wonderful metaphysic
subtlety, which, in phrases and definitions too often unmeaning to
our grosser intellect, saw the symbols of the most important spiritual
realities, and felt that on the distinction between homoousios and
homoiousios might hang the solution of the whole problem of humanity,
was set to battle in Alexandria, the ancient stronghold of Greek
philosophy, with the effete remains of the very scientific thought to
which it owed its extraordinary culture. Monastic isolation from family
and national duties especially fitted the fathers of that period for the
task, by giving them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with
a lifelong earnestness impossible to the more soci