They were in their day accounted great, and there was noise about them and lights, and throngs of those who flock to noise and light. But though some were mighty instruments of the Divine Will, the spiritual power did not proceed from them but from the silences and the obscurities and privacies of life. But for the holy men in the desert Cyril could no more have gloried and lasted than could a blossom without root. And on the other hand, Cyril and his like, and what they stood for, were in one sense the blossom and fruit of the seed sown by the hermits. It was the hermits who gave the spiritual impulse to Alexandria. Alexandria in turn gave new hermits to the desert—as new seeds fall from flowers in autumn. Such is the unity of the Church. It seems at first as if the rude cave or cell of the hermit cannot be reconciled with the splendour of the churches of their time, with, for instance, the wondrous cathedral of St. Sophia, as if the wretched cave or hole in the earth were a contradiction of the great marble temple, painted and gilded and set with all manner of gold ornament and precious stone—and yet there is this obvious reconciliation, that the one is the seed, the other the blossom; the one the prayer in secret, the other the reward made openly; one the white light, the other the rainbow of Creation. The first centuries of Christianity were a wild time. Many religions and philosophies were in the throes of glorious death, exchanging their mortality for Christian immortality. The music of change streams upward in wild, rapturous, sensuous, and agonising melody. Ten thousand passions and tragedies of conflicting import ravish the senses, and the heart leaps and the blood dances in the veins at the spectacle of death becoming life, or the heart sinks and the face pales at the dread of life turning to death. Only the calm soul sees the myriad colours blend at last and become reconciled in the whiteness of Christ. And that whiteness into which the other creeds must merge is the Holy Wisdom, the Sancta Sophia, with the name of which the early Eastern Church identified itself, representing the Bride of Christ as a new Athene, Sophia, the Christian Wisdom. The Holy Wisdom distilled from Isis and Athene and thousands of other goddesses and conceptions that died to become Christian, the water of life distilled from all the magical fluids of antiquity. The wild waste of passion and colour, the almost barbarous pageantry of the early Church, is the pageantry of autumn; the reds and browns and yellows, the flame-colours and death-colours, that go before the whiteness of Christmas. The cathedral of St. Sophia itself, the beautiful symbol of the Bride of Christ, is the representation of the death of thousands of creeds to become immortal in the new Christian conception. There is not an idea that is being transmuted that does not find its counterpart in the sacred edifice.