nor disposition to inquire whether the interpreta- | who would gather information, must at least open tion be wise or foolish. Thus it fares with the their eyes, and control their observation; those lessons of Providence, as with the parables of who would learn the secrets of nature, must Scripture, and that, in part at least, because the search beneath the surface of things; and those lessons of Providence are parables. Something who would understand the sacred record, must of this there must be, indeed, with all teaching, "search the Scriptures." Within the written whatever its form or matter, since teaching im- Revelation, the parables present no exception to plies learning, and that means attention and this requirement. They even call for special labour. Some means of instruction there must study, that we may not rest satisfied with a be in order to convey truth; and these mcans, superficial knowledge, but inherit the fulness of however good in themselves, must be carefully their instruction. Only by such study can we rightly used, in order that truth may be received. Those appreciate the manifold uses of the parables. THE CATECHETICAL SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA.-PANTENUS AND CLEMENT. "Much they reck of your praise and you! But the wronged great souls, can they be quit OMEWHERE about the year 180, a Greek gentleman named Clement came, in the course of an extensive tour of travel, to the city of Alexandria. It appears to have been his first visit to that famous and beautiful capital; and | it is scarcely a conjecture to say that what he saw as he sailed into its port, and walked its broad streets, must have filled him with wonder and delight. He would have been a dull and unimpressible traveller indeed and Clement was neither-could he have gazed for the first time on Alexandria, as it was towards the close of the second century, without being moved to admiration. As he sailed into the great port the stranger passed along a granite quay six miles in length, on which the busy crowds engaged in loading and unloading the vessels gave evidence of the industry and prosperity of the city. Wherever he looked in this port, into which his vessel had come, a perfect forest of masts met his eye, with strange prows and uncouth sails, such as he had never before seen; and the sailors could tell him that ships came to this harbour from every country of which he knew the name, and that in those great warehouses, which he saw overlooking the quay, were housed precious treasures from Arabia and the distant India, along with the products of Africa and Europe. Nor would Clement be less impressed by the beauty and wealth of the city to which he had come, when he left his ship and walked through its streets and promenades. Some of those streets were in themselves spectacles worth coming to see. One specially magnificent was two hundred feet wide, and ran for four miles right through the whole length of the city—that is, in the direction parallel with the sea; while another street, called the street of the Seven Stadia, of the same breadth, but shorter, crossed the former street at right BROWNING's Pictures in Florence. angles, and came out upon the great Quay. If Clement entered the city by this street, as is probable, he would not walk far without having proof of how just the epithet "many peopled" was, as applied to Alexandria. The Egyptian and the inhabitant of Asia Minor, the Roman and the Gaul, the light Greek and the graver Hebrew, and men from still more distant lands, were all to be seen, in their own costumes, mingled together in this | single street. Another marked feature of the city was the beautiful public buildings. Among others the stranger would be specially struck by the great Mausoleum called the Soma, which held the bodies of Alexander the Great and of the Ptolemies, the vast temple of the Egyptian god Serapis, and the temple of Neptune, where the Greek sailor paid his vows ere he went to sea. To many, however, the most interesting building, and that which brought many strangers to Alexandria, was the Museum or College of Philosophy. Founded by Alexander's wisest successor for the encouragement of literature and science, it had been patronized and supported by all the rulers of Egypt; and at the time Clement came to Alexandria it was enjoying the support of the Roman Government. The professors or fellows of this museum were supported by salaries from the public purse, and dined every day in the great dining-hall at the public expense. Sometimes in lecture-halls inside, sometimes in the covered walk or portico outside the building, these professors discoursed on their various subjects to crowds of pupils. For the Alexandrian museum was a famous institution, and young men from all parts of the civilized world, even from Rome and Athens, came to listen to its teachers. Euclid had taught in its halls, and, indeed, from the impulse it gave to the mathematical and physical sciences, it may justly be said to have been the his travels he had the privilege of sitting at the feet of several of those teachers who preserved "the tradition of the blessed doctrine derived directly from the holy apostles, Peter, James, John, and Paul--the son receiving it from the father." Of the teachers whom he heard before coming to Alexandria, he speaks thus : "Of these the one, in Greece, an Ionic; the other in Magna Græcia : the first of these from Cole-Syria, the second from Egypt, and others in the East. The one was born in the land of Assyria, and the other a Hebrew in Palestine." In the course of his travels he had now reached Alexandria; and although we do not know where in the city it was situated, he would not have much difficulty in finding his way to the place of which he was in quest, the Catechetical School of the Christians; for the Christians were too numerous and well-known in Alexandria for a stranger to experience any difficulty in finding out a place which was probably their headquarters. Clement found at the head of this Catechetical School a teacher named Pantonus. To him he listened with an admiration such as none of his former teachers had awakened. Having found one who an birth-place of modern science. The literature and philosophy taught there were in these days highly prized, although we do not now-a-days think much of them, nor read with any admiration what remains to us of the writings of the "literary fighting-cocks who were fattened by the king, and were always quarrelling in the coops of the museum." The literature of the place, especially at the time of which we speak, was poor patch-work, weak imitation, and its philosophy was wanting alike in speculative greatness and moral earnestness a wondrous combination of heterogeneous materials-Greek philosophy and Eastern mysticism patched together in a most unskilful and ungainly fashion. Yet, as we have said, the museum was famous. Young men came from afar to visit it and listen to its wisdom; probably it suited some of them none the worse that its teachings were not distinguished by intellectual vigour, and that its professors did not speak in tones of moral earnestness. Many came to study at the museum because such studies were the fashion, because they appeared to lend something of grace to a gentleman's conversation and manners, rather than drawn by deeper cravings. Still, the presence of so many literary and philosophical students gave Alex-swered to his ideal of a Christian instructor, he resolved andria the character of an intellectual as well as of a commercial capital; it was, as we should say, a university town as well as an emporium of commerce. We can well believe that Clement gazed with deepest interest on the buildings of the museum. He had not, however, come to enrol himself as a student. Clement was a Christian. He had not always been so. He had been born of heathen parents, in all probability, in Athens, and received a careful literary and philosophical training in the heathen schools of his native city. But neither their literature nor philosophy, to both of which he appears to have devoted himself with the utmost ardour, were capable of satisfying those deep longings after inward peace which had been awakened in his heart. But what he sought for in vain in the schools of philosophy, he found in the Church of Christ. Clement became a Christian. But as a Christian he retained some of the habits of thought, especially the desire for search and investigation, which he had acquired in the philosophical schools. This is apparent from the resolution which he formed soon after embracing the Faith, that he would not remain satisfied with the teachings of those Christian instructors whom he had already heard, but would travel to other lands and cities, and listen to all the various teachers of the Faith whom he could discover. Such Christian travels as those undertaken by Clement, characteristic of the times, stand in a midway position between the journeys of such seekers of knowledge as Herodotus and Plato, and the missionary journeyings of St. Paul to Rome, or of St. Mark-if tradition speaks truly-to Alexandria, somewhat more than a century earlier. In pursuance of his design, Clement visited the principal cities of Greece, Southern Italy, and Palestine. In the course of to remain in Alexandria. He was his "last" teacher, he No ciples of the faith to candidates for baptism. But Alexandria was filled with young men who claimed to be seeking after wisdom who professed to be willing to weigh or examine all that the various teachers had to propound. Some of these would find their way to the Catechetical School asking information regarding this new doctrine which was making so much noise. Some of those inquirers came, no doubt, frivolously enough, others in a more earnest spirit; but it was an opportunity, in any case, of declaring to those men the truths of the Faith. In the time of Pantonus, and probably earlier, it had become the custom in the Catechetical School for the teacher to deliver learned defences of Christianity, and bring its doctrines into comparison with other faiths and systems. Such men as Pantonus and Clement would be able to speak from experience to the philosophical students of Alexandria. It has been said of Clement, "He could tell the swarthy Syrian that it was no use to seek the classic land of Ionia, for he had tried them, and the truth was not there; he could assure him it was waste of time to go to Athens, for the porch and the garden were babbling of vain questions-he had listened in them all. He could calm the ardour of the young Athenian, his countryman, eager to try the banks of the Orontes, and to interrogate the sages of Syria; for he could tell him beforehand what they would say. He could shake his head when the young Egyptian, fresh from the provincial luxury of Antinoë, mentioned Magna Græcia as a mysterious land where the secret of knowledge was perhaps in the hands of the descendants of the Pelasgi; he had tried Tarentum, and he had tried Neapolis; they were worse than the Serapeion in unnameable licentiousness-less in earnest than the votaries that crowded the pleasure-barges of the Nile at a festival of the moon. He had asked, he had tried, he had tasted. The truth, he could tell them, was at their doors. It was elsewhere too; it was in Neapolis, in Antioch, in Athens, in Rome; but they would not find it taught in the chairs of the schools, nor discussed by the noble frequenters of the baths and the theatres. He knew it. And as he added many a tale of his wanderings and searchings—many an instance of genius falling short, of good-will labouring in the dark, of earnestness painfully at fault-many of those who heard him would yield themselves up to the vigorous thinker whose brow showed both the capacity and the unwearied activity of the soul within." With regard to the teaching of Clement in the Catechetical School of Alexandria, we have not to rest satisfied with a fancy picture. His writings which remain to us, are probably notes of his lectures, or, at all events, very similar to the words which he spoke as master of the school. Let us suppose a young Greek or Roman enters the school, having heard from a companion that the Christian teacher was on that day to deliver an "exhortation to the heathen;" he would probably hear some such words as we may still read in Clement's treatise of that name. After referring to some of the fabulous tales about the heathen gods, Clement might go on to say: "How, let me ask you, have you believed vain fables, and supposed animals to be charmed with music, while truth's shining face alone, as would seem, appears to you disguised, and is looked on with incredulous eyes. Let us bring from above out of heaven truth, with wisdom in all its brightness, and the sacred prophetic choir down to the holy mount of God; and let truth, darting her light to the most distant points, cast her rays all around on those that are involved in darkness, and deliver men from delusion, stretching out her very strong right hand, which is wisdom, for their salvation. And raising their eyes and looking above, let them abandon Helicon and Citharon, and take up their abode in Sion. For out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,'-the celestial Word, the true athlete crowned in the theatre of the whole universe. What my Eunomos sings is not the measure of Terpander, nor that of Capito, nor the Phrygian, nor Lydian, nor Dorian, but the immortal measure of the new harmony which bears God's name-the new, the Levitical song. 'Soother of pain, calmer of wrath, producing forgetfulness of all ills.' Like all the early Christian apologists, Clement was in habit of appealing to the heathen to abandon their idolatry on the grounds of the base characters of their deities and the licentious nature of their rites. It required courage thus to stand before an assembly of heathens in Alexandria, and to denounce and ridicule their ancestral faiths; we must remember that persecution had not yet ceased; if not always active, it might at any moment break out; and Clement, by speaking as he did, placed his life in the hands of his hearers, who might soon, if they chose, have an opportunity of denouncing him before the magistrate as a blasphemer of the gods. Perhaps not many of Clement's educated hearers had much serious belief in the old gods; but the habit of adhering to the faith in which they were born, which, as missionaries know, is generally a more powerful barrier to the reception of Christianity than any deep faith in heathenism, was evidently strong in Alexandria. Clement did not hesitate to speak of it as it deserved. "You say it is not creditable to subvert the customs handed down to us from our fathers. And why, then, do we not still use our first nourishment, milk, to which our nurses accustomed us from the time of our birth? Why do we increase or diminish our patrimony, and not keep it exactly the same as we got it? And I would ask you, if it does not appear to you monstrous, that you men who are God's handiwork, who have received your souls from Him, and belong wholly to God, should be subject to another master, and, what is more, serve the tyrant instead of the rightful king—the evil one instead of the good? Let us, therefore, repent and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-restraint, from unrighteous ness to righteousness, from godlessness to God. It is an enterprise of noble daring to take our way to God, and the enjoyment of many other good things is within the reach of the lovers of righteousness, who pursue eternal life, specially those things to which God Himself alludes, speaking by Isaiah, 'There is an inheritance for those who serve the Lord.'" Clement, as is known, placed a higher value on the philosophy of Greece than most of the fathers of the Church; yet in speaking to heathen he does not appear to have concealed from them the insufficiency of philosophy as a guide to the knowledge of the living God. "Philosophy," he says, "through its conceit, makes an idol of matter; although we are able to show as we proceed that even while defying certain demons it has a dream of the truth. The elements were designated as the first principles of all things by some of them; by Thales of Miletus, who celebrated water, &c. Atheists surely are those to be reckoned, who, through an unwise wisdom, worshipped matter; who did not indeed pay religious honour to stocks and stones, but deified earth, the mother of these; who did not make an image of Poseidon, but revered water itself." In several passages of his "Exhortation to the IIeathen," Clement abundantly vindicates his title to be reckoned a preacher of Christ's blessed evangel, and thus separates himself by a wide gulf from the philosophers of Alexandria. To ancient philosophy, as to ancient religion, the idea of stooping to the ignorant and the faiien, of making them special objects of care, was strange and incomprehensible. "When the white-robed priestesses of Ceres carried the sacred basket through the streets of Alexandria they cried out, 'Sinners, away, or keep your eyes to the ground.' When the crier, standing on the steps of the portico in front of the great temple, called upon the pagans to come near and join in the celebration of their mysteries, he cried out, All ye who are clean of hands and pure of heart, come to the sacrifice; all ye who are guiltless in thought and deed, come to the sacrifice." The philosopher was not less contemptuous than the priest to those whom he regarded as sinners. But the following words of Clement show that he had learned the lessons of another school: "No hindrance stands in the way of him who is bent on the knowledge of God. Neither childlessness, nor poverty, nor obscurity, nor want, can hinder him who eagerly strives after the knowledge of God; Christ is able to save in every place. For he that is fired with ardour and admiration for righteousness, being the lover of One who needs nothing, needs himself but little, having treasured up his bliss in nothing but himself and God, where is neither moth, robber, nor pirate, but the eternal Giver of good. . . . Believe Him, who is man and God; believe, O man, believe, O man, the living God, who suffered and is adored. Believe, ye slaves, Him who died; believe, all ye of human kind, Him who alone is God of all men.'" The Catechetical School in Alexandria would be fre | quented not only by curious and inquiring heathens, but to a greater extent probably by those who had decided for Christianity, and had either received, or were about to receive, Christian baptism. That Clement was not neglectful of the needs of this class, is evident from another of his works, called the "Pædagogus" or "Instructor." This "Pædagogus" of whom Clement writes, is Christ Himself. "For wandering," he writes, "in life as in deep darkness, we need a guide that cannot stumble or stray; and our guide is the best, not blind as the Scripture says, 'leading the blind into pits; but the word is keen-sighted, and scans the recesses of the heart." The book is occupied with precepts and counsels regarding Christian life, and enables us to form an idea of the sort of advices Clement was in the habit of addressing to catechumens and young Christians in the Catechetical School. Clement has sometimes been found fault with as a lover of paltry details, a trifler, and a teacher of asceticism. Some of his injunctions may, we grant, raise a smile in modern times; but it is our conviction that the more fully the circumstances and times amid which Clement wrote are known, the more will it be apparent that his counsels are fraught with considerate Christian wisdom. In Alexandria, the great Roman vice of gluttony was shamefully prevalent; it was therefore quite needful to remind the young Christians who came to the school, that their food ought to "be simple, truly plain, suiting precisely simple and artless children, as ministering to life, not to luxury." Perhaps the following may be regarded as pertaining more to manners than to morals; but it is one of those cases where manners and morals blend into one another. "From all slave-manners and excess we must abstain, and touch what is set before us in a decorous way; keeping the hands, and couch, and chin free of stains; preserving the grace of the countenance undisturbed, and committing no indecorum in the act of swallowing; but stretching out the hand at intervals in an orderly manner. We must guard against speaking anything while eating; for the voice becomes disagreeable and inarticulate when it is confined by full jaws; and the tongue pressed by the food and impeded in its natural energy, gives forth a confused utterance. For it is the very extreme of intemperance to confound the times whose uses are discordant." It was also necessary then-is it ever unnecessary— that a Christian teacher should warn his hearers against the sin of drunkenness. "You see the danger of shipwreck. The heart is drowned in much drink. The excess of drunkenness is compared to the danger of the sea, in which when the body has once been sunken like a ship, it descends to the depths of turpitude, overwhelmed in the mighty billows of wine." Not that Clement, with regard to wine, was an absolute ascetic. "Towards evening," he says, "about supper time, wine may be used, when we are no longer engaged in more serious readings. Then also the air becomes colder than it is during the day; so that the failing of natural warmth requires to be nourished by the introduction of heat. But even then it must only be a little wine that is to be used; for we must not go to intemperate potations." We cannot follow Clement into his various counsels and cautions, advising plain furniture rather than splendid, plain vessels rather than costly, although many of these details are deeply interesting. The purpose of all these counsels is well summed up in his own words: “For, in fine," he says, "in food, and clothes, and vessels, and everything else belonging to the house, I say comprehensively, that one must follow the institutions of the Christian man, as is serviceable and suitable to one's person, age, pursuits, time of life. For it becomes those that are servants of one God, that their possessions and furniture should exhibit the tokens of one beautiful life; and that each individually should be seen in faith, which shows no difference, practising all other things which are conformable to this uniform mode of life, and harmonious with this one scheme." A third work of Clement's which has come down to us goes by the strange name of "Stromata," or Carpet-work. It was not intended, as the "Exhortation to the Heathen," to be a call to conversion; nor, like the "Pædagogus," to guide the lives and consciences of those recently converted: it is addressed to advanced Christians to increase their knowledge. He wrote it, he tells us, to preserve the memory of what he had learned in his early travels, especially in order that the doctrines he had heard from those teachers at whose feet he had sat should not perish. “As a remedy against forgetfulness," to quote his own words, "truly an image and outline of those vigorous and animated discourses which I was privileged to hear, and of blessed and truly remarkable men." Another aim is visible in the "Stromata." It is an attempt to present a philosophy of Christianity, and to view it in its relations to other knowledge. "The mind of Clement," says an eminent writer," was bent upon the union of science and faith, of thought and life, of speculation and of historical revelation." The reason that Clement desired to make Christians men of knowledge was, that Alexandria was at the time filled with teachers who boasted that they and their followers were "Gnostics," or knowers, as distinguished from ordinary Christians. Although these men used the name of Christ, and were recognized by the Church as heretics, not as pagans, they were no more entitled to the name of Christians than Mohammed and his followers. They were really, although they used Christian language, not believers in Christianity, but in the principle which we find pervading most of the Oriental religions—namely, that matter is something evil and impure, mind again pure and divine. Hence, to be religions was to escape from the shackles of matter, to crush the body, and exalt the mind. This principle led in some cases to exaggerated asceticism; in others to abandoned living-the excuse being, in the latter cases, that the pure and divine mind had no sympathy with the excesses of the degraded body. These Gnostics talked also of two gods,—an evil god, the creator of matter; a good god, the creator of mind. They used Christian phrases, and quoted the Christians' books, but only because they saw that Christian ideas were influential. They made no attempt to learn from Scripture, but merely made it part of their task to show that Scripture did not condemn their dreams. Their rule of relief of one and of all was well described by St. Augustine when speaking of one of their eminent representatives:-"Devising of his own mind, not discovering in holy Scripture, or through the voice of the Holy Spirit, but from the miserable reasonings of human nature he devised this system." There are two ways of meeting unchristian error. We may directly assail its falsehoods and fallacies, or we may endeavour more indirectly to undermine its influence by reclaiming the territory which its teachers are wont to occupy for the service of the Church. Clement chose the latter mode. He saw no reason why a Christian should not be a Gnostic: the Christian ought to be a Gnostic in the true sense of the word. Although at times we believe most necessary, the endeavour to exhibit Christianity in the form of a philosophy has ever been surrounded with peril. Honest and true as his intentions were, Clement cannot be altogether cleared from the imputation of having introduced within the Church the exoteric and esoteric distinctions of the schools of philosophy, and of having spoken at times in language liable to grave misunderstanding. A deeper meaning, he said, met the "knower" when reading the Bible than that apparent to the ordinary Christian. Such a 'Gnostic, says Clement, 66 supplies the place of the apostles, by an upright life, by accurate knowledge, by assisting his friends, by removing the mountains of his neighbours, and casting down all the inequalities of their souls." Some of those deeper or Gnostic interpretations of Scripture are curious enough. The coat of many colours which Joseph wore, signified his various knowledge, of which his brethren were envious. They cast him, therefore, intc a pit in which was no water, after they had stripped him of his coat, that he might, like them, be without knowledge. When Job said that he came naked out of his mother's womb, and should return thither naked, he did not mean stripped of all worldly possessions; but free from vice and sin. Clement interprets the miracle of the five barley loaves and two fishes as follows. The barley loaves signify the previous preparation of the Jew and Greek for the Divine wheat-that is, the gospel; barley appearing earlier in the summer than wheat. The fishes signify the Greek philosophy, which was generated and carried along amidst the Gentile billows. The thinking of Clement is perhaps best known to most people by some words of his about the position and value of Gentile philosophy; words which have often created surprise |