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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: likeness of God. In proportion as a man has them, he is partaker of a
Divine nature. He can rise no higher, and he needs no more. Platonists
had said--No, that is only virtue; and virtue is the means, not the end.
We want proof of having something above that; something more than any
man of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform; something above
nature; portents and wonders. So they set to work to perform wonders;
and succeeded, I suppose, more or less. For now one enters into a whole
fairyland of those very phenomena which are puzzling us so nowadays--
ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the
effect of what we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these modern
puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom. It
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