They who ascribe miraculous power to dead men's bones, who make temples of charnel-houses, and bow before the images of the meanest of mankind, have surely no right to accuse of idolatry the Greek or the Egyptian, who embodies in a form of symbolic beauty ideas beyond the reach of words! 'Idolatry?
Do I worship the Pharos when I gaze at it, as I do for hours, with loving awe, as the token to me of the all-conquering might of Hellas?
Do I worship the roll on which Homer's words are written, when I welcome with delight the celestial truths which it unfolds to me, and even prize and love the material book for the sake of the message which it brings?
Do you fancy that any but the vulgar worship the image itself, or dream that it can help or hear them?
Does the lover mistake his mistress's picture for the living, speaking reality?
We worship the idea of which the image is a symbol.

Will you blame us because we use that symbol to represent the idea to our own affections and emotions instead of leaving it a barren notion, a vague imagination of our own intellect ?' 'Then,' asked Philammon, with a faltering voice, yet unable to restrain his curiosity, 'then you do reverence the heathen gods ?' Why Hypatia should have felt this question a sore one, puzzled Philammon; but she evidently did feel it as such, for she answered haughtily enough-- 'If Cyril had asked me that question, I should have disdained to answer.
To you I will tell, that before I can answer your question you must learn what those whom you call heathen gods are.

The vulgar, or rather those who find it their interest to calumniate the vulgar for the sake of confounding philosophers with them, may fancy them mere human beings, subject like man to the sufferings of pain and love, to the limitations of personality.

We, on the other hand, have been taught by the primeval philosophers of Greece, by the priests of ancient Egypt, and the sages of Babylon, to recognise in them the universal powers of nature, those children of the all-quickening spirit, which are but various emanations of the one primeval unity--say rather, various phases of that unity, as it has been variously conceived, according to the differences of climate and race, by the wise of different nations.

And thus, in our eyes, he who reverences the many, worships by that very act, with the highest and fullest adoration, the one of whose perfection they are the partial antitypes; perfect each in themselves, but each the image of only one of its perfections.' 'Why, then,' said Philammon, much relieved by this explanation, 'do you so dislike Christianity?
may it not be one of the many methods--' 'Because,' she answered, interrupting him impatiently, 'because it denies itself to be one of those many methods, and stakes its existence on the denial; because it arrogates to itself the exclusive revelation of the Divine, and cannot see, in its self-conceit, that its own doctrines disprove that assumption by their similarity to those of all creeds.