66 There, there, secure from every ill, in freedom we shall sing And unto thee, our gracious Lord, our praises shall confess That all our sorrow hath been good, and thou by pain canst bless." us, II. ALEXANDRIA. THE nameless person, the mystic figure, who appeared in the shadows of the night to St. Paul when he had come to the coast of the Ægean, before he crossed for the first time into Europe, was "a man of Macedonia ;" and that is all we know of him. Whence he came, who sent him, what he did afterwards, appearing and disappearing, is not told. His message, "Come over into Macedonia and help ," was the first European summons to Christianity to advance into the great field of its future triumphs. Why it came from there rather than from Athens, or Corinth, or Rome even, we do not know. But we do know that the new religion owed a great debt to that Macedonian power, a faint echo of whose voice it then heard. That power had begun to make itself felt beyond its own rugged mountains some three centuries and more before. It had destroyed the freedom of Greece, aspiring itself to be Greek. It had returned the Persian invasion, and overcoming the Persian arms had spread its conquests to the Euphrates and the Nile. It was not a Greek power, and was counted the enemy of Greece. But it was a powerful agent in diffusing Hellenic power and culture, in sending the Greek language and literature and spirit far and wide, and so indirectly preparing a way for Christianity. The one potent thing it did was to found a new city near the mouth of the Nile, which became the second city of the world. It was left to Alexander to see the advantages of a site which the wisdom of Egypt had for ages overlooked, and with a look and a word to call into being the rival, which at last became the subject, of Rome; a city which, according to Niebuhr, he designed to be the capital of the universal empire he aspired and failed to found. Whatever he designed, whatever he may have anticipated, Alexandria became the great monument of his genius, as it became the tomb of his remains. Nothing else which he did, no triumph of his arms, left such a mark on the history of the world. He brought the East and the West together, the Greek and the Oriental thought and life, and the point of junction was Alexandria. What he began it was left for the Ptolemies to finish; but from beginning to end it was the city of Alexander. It became a new Greece beyond the sea. It was at an angle where the three continents meet. With a lake on one side and the Mediterranean on the other, it had a secure and spacious harbor, the entrance lighted by the Pharos, 400 feet high, the greatest lighthouse of the world. It was fifteen miles in circuit, and shaped like a trooper's cloak, seven miles long and three broad. It had a plan, as the ancient cities generally had not, with two main streets, 240 feet wide, crossing each other at right angles in the middle of the city, and giving draught for cool northerly breezes from the sea. It had quarters for the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Jews, with a population of 600,000. A third of the city was given up to public parks and palaces. Its docks and aqueducts, the mole nearly a mile long, its museum and library, its court-house and necropolis, with the "soma " in which the Greek kings of Egypt as well as the great Macedonian conqueror were buried, and, most magnificent of all, the Temple of Serapis, the great god of the place, gave it the solid splendor which belongs to the great capitals of the world. A mart of commerce, it became the home of philosophy. First Greek then Roman, first pagan then Christian, the city of the Ptolemies, of Cleopatra and Hypatia, of Philo and Athanasius, of Euclid the mathematician and Antony the eremite, - for a time it held a great place in the history of the world. It was not the ships in its harbor, or the spices and dyes of Arabia and India, or the corn of Egypt, enriching its traffic; it was the intellectual excitement, the mingling of religions, the contact of philosophies and the commerce of thought, which made it great and renowned. It was the confluence of so many elements-national, commercial, intellectual, and religious-which made it superior to Antioch and next to Rome, even more cosmopolitan than the city of the Cæsars. The mysticism of the East and the culture of the West found in it equal hospitality. Both Judaism and Christianity took from it its unique stamp. For nearly three hundred years (323-30 B. C.), the period between Alexander and Cæsar, the Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies ruled at Alexandria. There were thirteen of them. The first three, whose reigns covered the first century of the Greek rule in Egypt, were wise and energetic princes. They were Greeks in spirit, and made Alexandria a Greek city. They were friends and patrons of learning. The first was a great builder. He built the great lighthouse on the island of Pharos; the causeway, a mile long, which connected it with the city; the hippodrome; the mausoleum where Alexander was buried; and the immense Temple of Serapis. He founded the Museum, a great university, with its library of 700,000 volumes, embracing the collected literature of the world. The Museum and the Serapeum were not only splendid in architecture, but had a scientific glory beyond that of porticoes and gardens. His son and grandson followed in his steps, and made the city and the kingdom great and prosperous. Alexandria became the home of letters. It was not Athens, the city of Plato, Sophocles, Phidias, but it had an ampler and more varied life. For a time it surpassed Antioch and Rome. Their successors degenerated, till with the gifted and voluptuous Cleopatra the Greek rule ended, and the naval battle of Actium gave Egypt to the Roman Cæsars.1 1 Pressensé, i. 265. Thirteen hundred years before, the Hebrews had been thrust out of Egypt. Alexander and the Ptolemies were now encouraging their descendants to come back. Alexandria became a Jewish almost as much as a Greek city. "Out of Egypt I called my son," God said of the nation of Israel in the beginning.1 And now he began to call them back, that a second time under Egyptian discipline they might reconnect themselves with the world from which they had been called out and had separated themselves for a thousand years. Rameses thrust them out. Alexander brought them back. As the city grew they increased, and in time formed two fifths of its vast population, and more than an eighth of the population of the country. It was a new Jerusalem in Egypt. And yet they became Alexandrian Jews, and Judaism here developed a new type. It was Hellenized in its new surroundings. The Greek learning came at least to the doors of the Jewish synagogue. Under the beneficent toleration of the early Ptolemies, in an atmosphere so much freer and more vital than that of Jerusalem, amidst scholars and philosophers, the Jewish Church felt new influences, some helpful, some harmful, some transient, some which passed into both churches, the Jewish and the Christian, to be a possession forever. Not like their countrymen at home following the fierce fight of the Maccabees, nor like the Jews of Babylon spinning such fancies as at last were woven into the Talmud, in Alexandria the Jews, clinging to the faith of their fathers, felt the force of the new world into which they were cast. For business, for intercourse, they learned the Greek language. For culture they learned the Greek literature. Their thought and life could not help being touched by the Greek spirit. They were Jews, and hence conservative and exclusive. But they were Jews, and hence alert, and not impassive to the stir of that strange world in which they were seeking their fortune. 1 Hosea xi. 1; Matt. ii. 15. |