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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: under the old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the
vulgar eyes. The Christian method was the exact opposite. They boldly
called those vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and
there gaze on the very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They
owned no ground for their own speculations which was not common to the
harlots and the slaves around. And this was what enabled them to do
this; this was what brought on them the charge of demagogism, the hatred
of philosophers, the persecution of princes--that their ground was a
moral ground, and not a merely intellectual one; that they started, not
from any notions of the understanding, but from the inward conscience,
that truly pure Reason in which the intellectual and the moral spheres
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