speculations in the first centuries.  Clemens, Origen, Dionysius, Athanasius, were eminent teachers in that school.  Its doctrines were[201] that God had revealed himself to all nations by his Logos, or Word.  Christianity is its highest revelation.  The common Christian lives by faith, but the more advanced believer has gnosis, or philosophic insight of Christianity as the eternal law of the soul.  This doctrine soon substituted speculation in place of the simplicity of early Christianity.  The influence of Alexandrian thought was increased by the high culture which prevailed there, and by the book-trade of this Egyptian city.  All the oldest manuscripts of the Bible now extant were transcribed by Alexandrian penmen.  The oldest versions were made in Alexandria.  Finally the intense fervor of the Egyptian mind exercised its natural influence on Christianity, as it did on Judaism and Heathenism.  The Oriental speculative element of Egyptian life was reinforced by the African fire; and in Christianity, as before in the old religion, we find both working together.  By the side of the Alexandrian speculations on the nature of God and the Trinity appear the maniacal devotion of the monks of the Thebaid.  The ardor of belief which had overcome even the tenacity of Judaism, and modified it into its two Egyptian forms of the speculations of Philo and the monastic devotion of the Therapeutae, reappeared in a like action upon Christian belief and Christian practice.  How large a part of our present Christianity is due to these two influences we may not be able to say.  But palpable traces of Egyptian speculation appear in the Church doctrines of the Trinity and atonement, and the material resurrection[202] of the same particles which constitute the earthly body.  And an equally evident influence from Egyptian asceticism is found in the long history of Christian monasticism, no trace of which appears in the New Testament, and no authority for which can be found in any teaching or example of Christ.  The mystical theology and mystical devotion of Egypt are yet at work in the Christian Church.  But beside the doctrines directly derived from Egypt, there has probably come into Christianity another and more important element from this source.  The spirit of a race, a nation, a civilization, a religion is more indestructible than its forms, more pervasive than its opinions, and will exercise an interior influence long after its outward forms have disappeared.  The spirit of the Egyptian religion was reverence for the divine mystery of organic life, the worship of God in creation, of unity in variety, of each in all.  Through the Christian Church in Egypt, the schools of Alexandria, the monks of the Thebaid, these elements filtered into the mind of Christendom.  They gave a materialistic tone to the conceptions of the early Church, concerning God, Satan, the angels and devils, Heaven, Hell, the judgment, and the resurrection.  They prevented thereby the triumph of a misty Oriental spiritualism.  Too gross indeed in themselves, they yet were better than the Donatism which would have turned every spiritual fact into a ghost or a shadow.  The African spirit, in the fiery words of a Tertullian and an Augustine, ran into a materialism, which, opposed to the opposite extreme of idealism, saved to the Church its healthy realism.