ALEXANDRIA.
We left Jaffa on the Monday, and in twenty-four hours after were landed
at Alexandria. Alexandria is not a desirable place to land at;
travellers have to trust generally to native boatmen, who are a race of
robbers. For instance, an American gentleman described to me how it
fared with him on attempting to land a few years since. He and a friend
made a bargain with a respectable man to put them ashore. He called a
boatman, into whose boat they got with their luggage. No sooner had the
man rowed a little way from the ship than he stopped and demanded the
instant payment of a sum four times the amount that had been agreed upon.
The travellers said they had made an agreement with his master, and he
was bound to carry it out. He replied that he had no master; that the
boat was his, that the oars were his, and that he would neither take them
back to the ship nor row them ashore unless they complied with his
request. One of the gentlemen had a revolver, which he held at the
rascal’s head, telling him to prepare for instant death. The man
sullenly obeyed, but no sooner had he reached the shore than he landed
and preferred against the travellers a charge of attempting to murder
him. The affair promised to be serious, but it was discovered by the
judge that the revolver was not loaded, nor ever had been loaded, and the
travellers were at length allowed to depart in peace. I heard of another
case of a Frenchman shooting his boatman, who refused to fulfil his
contract. In my case, happily, I landed on the quay, and had no trouble
with the boatmen at all.
At length I am fairly landed in the land of the Pharaohs—a land whose
records are engraved in stones, and date thousands of years before the
birth of Christ. You see nothing of Alexandria till you approach it, and
then it spreads out before you in all its charm, from Pharos, the most
ancient lighthouse in the world, on one side, to Pompey’s Pillar on the
other. Soon after I land at the quay, I make my way to the
railway-station in a carriage and pair, for which I had agreed to pay a
shilling. At the station the driver has the impudence to demand two
shillings, which I refuse to give, whilst a dragoman, who has fastened
himself on to me, though I have attempted to get rid of him, demands a
shilling for his unnecessary attendance. I offer him threepence; he is
indignant. ‘I am a dragoman,’ he exclaims in an angry tone. ‘What do
you take me for?’ At length I give him sixpence, and he goes away in
peace. I smoke my first pipe of excellent Egyptian tobacco, swallow a
tiny cup of coffee, all sugar and grounds, and survey the scene from the
outside of the excellent railway-station, which is a credit to the city.
Every minute a blacking boy begs me to let him clean my boots, but as I
need not his services they are declined. On my way I have seen every
sign of industry and wealth: spacious shops, and a fine square adorned
with handsome houses, and with a good statue of Ibrahim Pasha—the man to
whom modern Egypt owes its first dawn of revived prosperity. The
municipal authorities of the place have [Picture: Pompey’s Pillar,
Alexandria] done much to promote its prosperity. The traveller will find
it to his advantage to stop here a day or two. The hotels are excellent,
and, with one exception, by no means dear. The harbour is full of
shipping and steamers, and the number of trains laden with merchandise
running between Cairo and Alexandria seems incessant. The
railway-carriages are an immense improvement on those which take you from
Jaffa to Jerusalem. Alexandria has a population of over 300,000, and its
prosperity has greatly increased of late. The English reside principally
at Ramleh, five miles off, to which there is a local train service. On
your way you pass the battlefield between the English and the French,
where our General, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, lost his life in the hour of
victory.
Commerce seems to have had her birthplace in Egypt. In the time of
Joseph, we read, all countries came there to buy corn. Fifteen hundred
years before the birth of Christ its merchants brought indigo and muslins
from India, and porcelain from China, and the fame of its mariners was
great. The trade route was down the Persian Gulf, along the Tigris,
through Palmyra—the Tadmor of old—down to the cities of the
Mediterranean. Arab mariners also sailed from India, keeping close to
the coast till they reached Berenice, in the Red Sea, whence the goods
were transported to Captos, thence down the Nile to Alexandria. ‘Under
such Emperors as the cruel and dissipated Commodus,’ writes Mr. R. W.
Fraser, in his ‘British India,’ ‘the plundering barbarian, Caracalla, and
the infamous Heliogabalus, the wealth that came from the East through
Alexandria to the imperial city of Rome, passed away to Constantinople
and the rising cities along the Mediterranean.’
The glory of Alexandria in the olden time was the Serapeum, sacred to the
worship of Serapis, a god originally worshipped in Sinope, and brought to
Alexandria by the Emperor Ptolemy—worshipped eventually by the Romans as
the Supreme Being, the beneficent Lord of Life and Death. It is clear
the Ptolemies—at one and the same time Egyptian Pharaohs and Greek
princes—felt the need of a real and presiding deity for the great city,
with its enormous population, not only from Greece and its colonies, but
from all the nations and tribes of the Mediterranean and the East.
As the seat of a god-worship became important, so did the deity its
patron. When Alexandria became the official and mercantile capital of
Egypt, Serapis became the chief of all the gods of the land, and there
his shrine was worshipped for nearly one thousand years. The worship of
Serapis was the last to fall before the advancing force of Christianity.
The philosopher saw in Serapis, writes Macrobius, nothing more than the
_anima mundi_, the spirit of whom universal nature is the body; so that
by an easy transition Serapis came to be worshipped as the embodiment of
the one Supreme whose representative on earth was Christ. This is clear
from a letter written by the Emperor Hadrian A.D. 131. ‘I am now
become,’ writes Hadrian, ‘fully acquainted with that Egypt which you
extol so highly. I have found the people vain, fickle, and shifting with
every change of opinion. Those who worship Serapis are, in fact,
Christians; even those who style themselves the bishops of Christ are
actually devoted to Serapis. There is no chief of a Jewish synagogue, no
Samaritan, no Christian bishop, who is not an astrologer, a
fortune-teller, or a conjurer. The very Patriarch of Tiberias is
compelled, when he comes to Egypt, by one party to adore Serapis, by
another to worship Christ.’
And this seems to show that some Christians, in order to escape
persecution, enjoyed their own faith under the cover of the national and
local worship, which was susceptible of a spiritual interpretation quite
cognate to their own ideas. A similar case occurred in Spain, as the
historical reader may remember, when so many Jews, in fear of the
Inquisition, nominally became Roman Catholics. Accordingly, it is clear
that the tone of the higher, the fashionable society in Alexandria was to
believe that on some grander or philosophic theory all these religions
differed in form, but were essentially the same; that all adored one
Logos or Demiurge under different names, all employed the same arts to
impose on the vulgar, and all were equally despicable to the real
philosopher.
The worship of Serapis was abolished in the reign of Justinian, and of
the former glory of the Serapeum nothing now remains, unless it be
Pompey’s Pillar, which was said by some to have formed part of the
Serapeum. According to Tacitus, sick persons were accustomed to pass a
night in the Serapeum in order to regain their health. The colossal
statue of Serapis was involved in the ruin of his temple and religion.
It was believed that if an insult were offered to that statue, chaos
would ensue. When a Christian soldier aimed his first blow, even the
Christians trembled for the event. The victorious soldier, Gibbon tells
us, repeated his blows; the huge idol was overthrown and broken in
pieces, and the limbs of Serapis were ignominiously dragged through the
streets of Alexandria. His mangled carcase was burnt in the amphitheatre
amidst the shouts of the people, and many persons attributed their
conversion to this discovery of the impotence of their great deity. A
process something similar, attended with similar results, has more than
once occurred in the history of missionary enterprise.
Deeply interesting is Alexandria from a historical point of view. It was
founded by Alexander the Great more than 300 years before Christ. King
Ptolemy, the first of that name, made it the capital of his kingdom, laid
the foundations of its enormous library, and held out inducements to men
of learning to come from all parts of the world to settle there. During
the siege of the city by the Romans the library was burnt, but Antony
afterwards gave the library a large collection of manuscripts, which
formed the nucleus of a second library. In the early centuries of our
era the town was torn with religious dissensions about the Jews and
religious dogma. It was here the beautiful Hypatia, the fair heroine of
Kingsley’s celebrated novel, was torn to pieces by an infuriated mob.
St. Mark is said to have preached the Gospel here. It was here that
there arose fierce discussions between Arius and Athanasius and Cyril.
The Christians were persecuted with great severity by Decius, by
Valerianus, and Diocletian. The city then declined in wealth and
importance. Its population dwindled away. All fanatics, Christian or
pagan, seem to me equally to blame.
It was at one time, as I have said, the headquarters of the worship of
Serapis. The temple stood to the east of Alexandria, near Pompey’s
Pillar. It is said to have been one of the most remarkable buildings in
the world, and was filled with excellent statues and other works of art.
It was destroyed by the Christian fanatic, Theophilus, during the reign
of Theodosius II. Gibbon describes the prelate as ‘a bold, bad man, the
perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, whose hands were alternately
polluted with gold and blood.’ The library of the Serapeum is said to
have contained about 400,000 manuscripts; at any rate, when it was burnt
by the command of the Khalif Omar, the manuscripts were said to have been
sufficiently numerous to heat the public baths for six months. Perhaps
it is as well they were not all preserved. Of making many books there is
no end, and many are the books published in this intelligent age, the
burning of which would be no loss, but a gain, to the reading public.
Among the famous men who studied in the original library of Alexandria
were Strabo, Hipparchus, Archimedes, Plato, and Euclid.
Then came the blighting rule of the Turk, and the wise men moved away.
They are all vanished—gone; in their place have come the Jew banker, the
tradesman, and the merchant prince. The people amuse me. They wear the
cotton tunic longer, and have a more Arabian cast of feature than the
Jews. I see a funeral, with a long line of women following. I see a
Turk at his devotions. He spreads a small carpet before him, then raises
his arms above his head, muttering something all the while; then he bows
his body so that the head touches the ground, and so he goes on.
In a little while we are off for Cairo, or Caire, as they call it here.
On my way I get my first glimpse of one of the branches of the Nile, one
of the largest, and certainly the most renowned, rivers in the world. In
a few days I see more of the Nile, the overflow of which has not yet been
dried up, and watch the people in the mud, far too soft to admit of
ploughing, hoeing the land, rich and dark, and casting in the seed which
is soon to bear an abundant harvest. On our way to Cairo we pass a
fertile country, and see crops of sugarcane and rice and maize growing,
and the blue-clad fellaheen at work. We pass several big towns, which
seem thickly populated and full of life. The houses are everywhere the
same—white, with flat roofs.
As originally founded, Alexandria was only equalled by Rome itself. It
comprehended a circumference of fifteen miles, and was peopled by 300,000
free inhabitants, besides at least an equal number of slaves. The
lucrative trade of Arabia and India flowed through its port to Rome and
the provinces. No one lived an idle life. There was plenty of work for
all, chiefly in glass-blowing, weaving of linen, and the manufacture of
papyrus. The people, a mixture of all nations under the sun, were
difficult to rule, and always ready for sedition. A transient scarcity
of flesh or lentils, the neglect of a public salutation, a mistake of
precedency in the public baths, or a religious dispute, such as the
sacrilegious murder of a divine cat, was quite sufficient to create a
bloody tumult.
Origen was a native of Alexandria. It was there, after his time, that
the endless controversy as to the nature of the Three Persons in the
Trinity originated—a controversy which lasted for centuries, which led to
wars and massacres, and which finally separated the Churches of Greece
and Rome. The Jews, who had settled in Alexandria by the invitation of
the Ptolemies, carried the teaching of Plato into their religious
speculations. In time Arius arose to proclaim his idea of the Logos, and
Athanasius to oppose and protest, and ultimately triumph. The
Homoousians prevailed, and the Homoiousians were branded and persecuted
as heretics—enemies alike to God and man; yet Athanasius was driven from
his diocese, and the famous St. George of Cappadocia reigned in his
stead. The pagans of Alexandria, who still formed a numerous and
discontented party, were easily persuaded to desert a Bishop whom they
feared and esteemed. At a later time Cyril became the Archbishop, and
distinguished his orthodox career by the animosity with which he expelled
the Jews, and opposed the doctrine of Nestorius, who taught that there
was a Divine and human Christ, and refused to worship the Virgin Mary as
the mother of God.
‘He was a most expert logician,’ writes Zosimus, ‘but perverted his
talents to evil powers, and had the audacity to preach what no one before
him had ever suggested, namely, that the Son of God was made out of that
which had no prior existence; that there was a period of time in which He
existed not; that as possessing free will, He was capable of vice; and
that He was created, not made.’ At the Council of Nicæa, held in the
reign of Constantine, it was decided that Christ and the Father were of
one and the same nature, and the doctrine of Arius, that Christ and God
were only similar in nature, was declared heretical. Nevertheless, the
Arians became more numerous than ever under the reign of Valens. As soon
as the Christians of the West, writes Gibbon, had extricated themselves
from the snares of the creed of Rimini, they happily relapsed into the
slumber of orthodoxy, and the small remains of the Arian party that still
subsisted in Sirmium or Milan might be considered as objects of contempt
rather than resentment. But in the provinces of the East, from the
Euxine to the extremity of Thebais, the strength and number of the
hostile factions were equally balanced, and this equality, instead of
recommending the counsels of peace, served only to perpetuate the horrors
of religious war. The monks and bishops supported their arguments by
invectives, and their invectives were sometimes followed by blows.
Athanasius still reigned at Alexandria, but the thrones of Constantinople
and Antioch were occupied by Arian prelates, and every episcopal vacancy
was the occasion of a popular tumult. The Homoousians were fortified by
the reconciliation of fifty-nine Macedonian or semi-Arian bishops, but
their secret reluctance to embrace the Divinity of the Holy Ghost clouded
the splendour of their triumph, and the declaration of Valens, who in the
first years of his reign had imitated the impartial conduct of his
brother, was an important victory on the side of Arianism. Well might
Dr. Arnold write that it was an evil hour for the Church when Constantine
connected Christianity with the State. It is really wonderful that real
Christianity survived that fatal step when the sword of the civil
magistrate was drawn in its support. It is hardly yet recognised that
the religion of Jesus of Nazareth flourishes best when free from State
patronage and control.