If every step was correct, the conclusion
must be correct also; so he must end, after all, in the right path--that
is, of course, supposing Christianity to be the right path--and return
to fight the Church's battles, with the sword which he had wrested from
Goliath the Philistine....But he had not won the sword yet.; and in the
meanwhile, learning was weary work; and sufficient for the day was the
good, as well as the evil, thereof.

So, enabled by his gold coin each month to devote himself entirely
to study, he became very much what Peter would have coarsely termed a
heathen. At first, indeed, he slipped into the Christian churches,
from a habit of conscience. But habits soon grow sleepy; the fear of
discovery and recapture made his attendance more and more of a labour.
And keeping himself apart as much as possible from the congregation, as
a lonely and secret worshipper, he soon found himself as separate from
them in heart as in daily life. He felt that they, and even more than
they, those flowery and bombastic pulpit rhetoricians, who were paid for
their sermons by the clapping and cheering of the congregation, were
not thinking of, longing after, the same things as himself. Besides, he
never spoke to a Christian; for the negress at his lodgings seemed to
avoid him--whether from modesty or terror, he could not tell; and cut
off thus from the outward 'communion of saints,' he found himself fast
parting away from the inward one. So he went no more to church, and
looked the other way, he hardly knew why, whenever he passed the
Caesareum; and Cyril, and all his mighty organisation, became to him
another world, with which he had even less to do than with those
planets over his head, whose mysterious movements, and symbolisms, and
influences Hypatia's lectures on astronomy were just opening before his
bewildered imagination.

Hypatia watched all this with growing self-satisfaction, and fed herself
with the dream that through Philammon she might see her wildest hopes
realised. After the manner of women, she crowned him, in her own
imagination, with all powers and excellences which she would have wished
him to possess, as well as with those which he actually manifested, till
Philammon would have been as much astonished as self-glorified could he
have seen the idealised caricature of himself which the sweet enthusiast
had painted for her private enjoyment. They were blissful months those
to poor Hypatia. Orestes, for some re