s purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung
necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and
want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its
purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion--the
fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul.

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to
conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its
control.

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of
Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent
by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make
good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy
God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from
immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who
had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent
evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the
difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle,
and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable
fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various
proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the
Hellenists, the Therapeutae, those strange Essene communists, with the
innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle
was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the
best of the remainder had ranged themselves--Manicheism and Catholic
Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian--Catholicism in which the
Jewish--element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the
fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge
how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the
mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us
trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's
Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle
fighting over words and straws.

Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as
the philosophers had seen, in _matter_, it was so far a conclusion which
both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of