The substitution which was
gradually taking place of naturalism for humanism, the adoration of
cosmical and mystical powers instead of the human attributes of the
deities of the older creed, was the means of re-awakening popular
superstition, while at the same time the Alexandrian speculations of
Neo-Platonism gave a religious aspect to philosophy.

Accordingly the third, or philosophical tendency in reference to religion,
distinct from the two already named, of positive unbelief in the
supernatural on the one hand, and devotion sincere or artificial to
heathen worship on the other, comprises, in addition to the older schools
of Stoics and Platonists, the new eclectic school just spoken of. The
three schools agreed in extracting a philosophy out of the popular
religion, by searching for historic or moral truth veiled in its symbols.
The Stoic, as being the least speculative, employed itself less with
religion than the others. Its doctrine, ethical rather than metaphysical,
concerned with the will rather than the intellect, juridical and formal
rather than speculative, seemed especially to give expression to the Roman
character, as the Platonic to the Greek, or as the eclectic to the hybrid,
half Oriental half European, which marked Alexandria. In the writings of
M. Aurelius, one of the emperors most noted for the persecution of the
church, it manifests itself rather as a rule of life than a subject for
belief, as morality rather than religion.(133) The Stoic opposition to
Christianity was the contempt of the Gaul or Roman for what was foreign,
or of ethical philosophy for religion.

The Platonic doctrine, so far as it is represented in an impure form in
the early centuries, sought, as of old, to explore the connexion between
the visible and invisible worlds, and to rise above the phenomenon into
the spiritual. Hence in its view of heathen religion it strove to rescue
the ideal religion from the actual, and to discover the one revelation of
the Divine ideal amid the great variety of religious traditions and modes
of worship. But its invincible dualism, separating by an impassable chasm
God from the world, and mind from matter, identifying goodness with the
one, evil with the other, prevented belief in a religion like
Christianity, which was penetrated by the Hebrew conceptions of the
universe, so alien both to dualism and pantheism.

The line is not very marked which separates this philosophy from the
professed revival