commerce, a few Hebrews, of a more
liberal spirit, devoted their lives to religious and philosophical
contemplation. [15] They cultivated with diligence, and embraced with
ardor, the theological system of the Athenian sage. But their national
pride would have been mortified by a fair confession of their former
poverty: and they boldly marked, as the sacred inheritance of their
ancestors, the gold and jewels which they had so lately stolen from
their Egyptian masters. One hundred years before the birth of Christ,
a philosophical treatise, which manifestly betrays the style and
sentiments of the school of Plato, was produced by the Alexandrian Jews,
and unanimously received as a genuine and valuable relic of the inspired
Wisdom of Solomon. [16] A similar union of the Mosaic faith and the
Grecian philosophy, distinguishes the works of Philo, which were
composed, for the most part, under the reign of Augustus. [17] The
material soul of the universe [18] might offend the piety of the
Hebrews: but they applied the character of the Logos to the Jehovah of
Moses and the patriarchs; and the Son of God was introduced upon earth
under a visible, and even human appearance, to perform those familiar
offices which seem incompatible with the nature and attributes of the
Universal Cause. [19]

[Footnote 13: Brucker, Hist. Philosoph. tom. i. p. 1349-1357. The
Alexandrian school is celebrated by Strabo (l. xvii.) and Ammianus,
(xxii. 6.) Note: The philosophy of Plato was not the only source of
that professed in the school of Alexandria. That city, in which Greek,
Jewish, and Egyptian men of letters were assembled, was the scene of a
strange fusion of the system of these three people. The Greeks brought a
Platonism, already much changed; the Jews, who had acquired at Babylon
a great number of Oriental notions, and whose theological opinions had
undergone great changes by this intercourse, endeavored to reconcile
Platonism with their new doctrine, and disfigured it entirely: lastly,
the Egyptians, who were not willing to abandon notions for which the
Greeks themselves entertained respect, endeavored on their side
to reconcile their own with those of their neighbors. It is in
Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon that we trace the influence
of Oriental philosophy rather than that of Platonism. We find in these
books, and in those of the later prophets, as in Ezekiel, notions
unknown to the Jews before the Babylonian captivity, of which