while a pedant makes
common cause with a profligate, to drag them back again into the very
black gulf of outer darkness, ignorance, brutal lust, grinding slavery,
from which the Son of God died to free them, from which they are
painfully and slowly struggling upward to the light of day? You, sir, if
you be a Christian catechumen, should know for yourself what would
have been the fate of Alexandria had the devil's plot of two days since
succeeded. What if the people struck too fiercely? They struck in the
right place. What if they have given the reins to passions fit only
for heathens? Recollect the centuries of heathendom which bred those
passions in them, and blame not my teaching, but the teaching of their
forefathers. That very Peter.... What if he have for once given place to
the devil, and avenged where he should have forgiven? Has he no memories
which may excuse him for fancying, in a just paroxysm of dread, that
idolatry and falsehood must be crushed at any risk?--He who counts back
for now three hundred years, in persecution after persecution, martyrs,
sir! martyrs--if you know what that word implies--of his own blood and
kin; who, when he was but a seven years' boy, saw his own father made a
sightless cripple to this day, and his elder sister, a consecrated nun,
devoured alive by swine in the open streets, at the hands of those who
supported the very philosophy, the very gods, which Hypatia attempted
yesterday to restore. God shall judge such a man; not I, nor you!'

'Let God judge him, then, by delivering him to God's minister.'

'God's minister? That heathen and apostate Prefect? When he has expiated
his apostasy by penance, and returned publicly to the bosom of the
Church, it will be time enough to obey him: till then he is the minister
of none but the devil. And no ecclesiastic shall suffer at the tribunal
of an infidel. Holy Writ forbids us to go to law before the unjust.--Let
the world say of me what it will. I defy it and its rulers. I have to
establish the kingdom of God in this city, and do it I will, knowing
that other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is
Christ.'

'Wherefore you proceed to lay it afresh. A curious method of proving
that it is laid already.'

'What do you mean?' asked Cyril angrily.

'Simply that God's kingdom, if it exist at all, must be a sort of
kingdom, considering Who is The King of it, which would have established
itself without your help some time s