and his hope that it may pass without catastrophe from Pagan to Christian, a hope that could have found expression only at Alexandria, where contending assertions have so often been harmonized, and whose own god, Serapis, had expressed the union of Egypt and Greece.
Looking back—it is so easy now to look back!—one can see that the hope was vain. Christianity, though she contained little that was fresh doctrinally, yet descended with a double-edged sword that hacked the ancient world to pieces. For she had declared war against two great forces—Sex and the State—and during her complicated contest with them the old order was bound to disappear. The contest had not really begun in Clement's day. Sex disquieted him, but he did not revolt against it like his successor Origen. The State exiled him, but it had not yet put forth, as it did under Diocletian, its full claims to divinity. He lived in a period of transition, and in Alexandria. And in that curious city, which had never been young and hoped never to grow old, conciliation must have seemed more possible than elsewhere, and the graciousness of Greece not quite incompatible with the Grace of God.
