ir brethren, and
walked on still in darkness, not knowing whither they were going'....
till Amrou and his Mohammedans appeared; and whether they discovered the
fact or not, they went to their own place....

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though He stands and waits with patience, with exactness grinds He all--

And so found, in due time, the philosophers as well as the ecclesiastics
of Alexandria.

Twenty years after Hypatia's death, philosophy was flickering down
to the very socket. Hypatia's murder was its death-blow. In language
tremendous and unmistakable, philosophers had been informed that mankind
had done with them; that they had been weighed in the balances, and
found wanting; that if they had no better Gospel than that to preach,
they must make way for those who had. And they did make way. We hear
little or nothing of them or their wisdom henceforth, except at Athens,
where Proclus, Marinus, Isidore, and others kept up 'the golden chain of
the Platonic succession,' and descended deeper and deeper, one after the
other, into the realms of confusion--confusion of the material with
the spiritual, of the subject with the object, the moral with the
intellectual; self-consistent in one thing only,--namely, in their
exclusive Pharisaism utterly unable to proclaim any good news for man
as man, or even to conceive of the possibility of such, and gradually
looking with more and more complacency on all superstitious which
did not involve that one idea, which alone they stated,--namely,
the Incarnation; craving after signs and wonders, dabbling in magic,
astrology, and barbarian fetichisms; bemoaning the fallen age, and
barking querulously at every form of human thought except their own;
writing pompous biographies, full of bad Greek, worse taste, and still
worse miracles....

--That last drear mood Of envious sloth, and proud decrepitude; No
faith, no art, no king, no priest, no God; While round the freezing
founts of life in snarling ring, Crouch'd on the bareworn sod, Babbling
about the unreturning spring, And whining for dead gods, who cannot
save, The toothless systems shiver to their grave.

The last scene of their tragedy was not without a touch of pathos
.... In the year 629, Justinian finally closed, by imperial edict, the
schools of Athens. They had nothing more to tell the world, but what the
world had yawned over a thousand times before: why should they break
the bless