what is right. He has to free himself from the power of passion. He has
to give up all thoughts of pleasure. He must prefer goodness in the
midst of torture to evil with unlimited pleasure. He has to resist the
temptations of the body, keeping it under strict control, and with the
eye of the soul undimmed by corporeal wants and impulses, contemplate
God the supreme good, and live a life according to reason. In other
words, he must strive after likeness to God as he reveals himself in his
Reason or in Christ. Clement thus looks entirely at the enlightened
moral elevation to which Christianity raises man. He believed that
Christ instructed men before he came into the world, and he therefore
viewed heathenism with kindly eye. He was also favourable to the pursuit
of all kinds of knowledge. All enlightenment tended to lead up to the
truths of Christianity, and hence knowledge of every kind not evil was
its handmaid. Clement had at the same time a strong belief in evolution
or development. The world went through various stages in preparation for
Christianity. The man goes through various stages before he can reach
Christian perfection. And Clement conceived that this development took
place not merely in this life, but in the future through successive
grades. The Jew and the heathen had the gospel preached to them in the
world below by Christ and his apostles, and Christians will have to pass
through processes of purification and trial after death before they
reach knowledge and perfect bliss.

The beliefs of Clement have caused considerable difference of opinion
among modern scholars. He sought the truth from whatever quarter he
could get it, believing that all that is good comes from God, wherever
it be found. He belongs therefore to no school of philosophers. He calls
himself an Eclectic. He was in the main a Neoplatonist, drawing from
that school his doctrines of the Monad and his strong tendency towards
mysticism. For his moral doctrine he borrowed freely from Stoicism.
Aristotelian features may be found but are quite subordinate. But
Clement always regards the articles of the Christian creed as the axioms
of a new philosophy. Daehne had tried to show that he was Neoplatonic,
and Reinkens has maintained that he was essentially Aristotelian. His
mode of viewing Christianity does not fit into any classification. It is
the result of the period in which he lived, of his wide culture and the
simplicity and noble purity of his