e object of human adoration. And this not only meant a departure
from Judaism; it meant a departure from philosophy. The supreme unity
of the pure reason was sacrificed no less than the unity of the
soaring religious imagination. The one transcendental God became
again, as He had been to the Greek theologians, an inscrutable
impersonal power, who was unknown to man and ruled over the universe
by His begotten son, the Logos. The sublimity of the Hebrew
conception, which combines personality with unity, was lost, and the
harmony of the intellectual and emotional aspirations achieved by
Philo was broken straightway by those who professed to follow him. The
skeleton of his thought was clothed with a body wherein his spirit
could never have dwelt. It was the penalty which Philo paid for
vagueness of expression and luxuriance of words that his works became
the support of doctrines which he had combated, the guide of those who
were opposed to his life's ideal.

The experience of the Church showed how right was Philo's judgment
when he declared that the rejection of the Torah would produce chaos.
The fourth and fifth centuries exhibit an era of unparalleled disorder
and confusion in the religious world,[364] sect struggling with sect,
creed with creed, churches rising and falling, dogmas set up by
councils and forced upon men's souls at the point of the Roman sword!
And out of this struggling mass of beliefs and fancies, theologies and
superstitions, sects and political forces, there arose a tyrannical,
dogmatic Church which laid far heavier burthens on men's minds than
ever the most ruthless Pharisee of the theologian's imagination had
laid upon their body and spirit. The yoke of the law of Moses,
sanctifying the life, had been broken; the fiat of popes and the
decrees of synods were the saving beliefs which ensured the Kingdom of
Heaven! Was it to this that the allegorizing of the law, the search
for the spirit beneath the letter, the reinterpretation of the holy
law of Moses in the light of philosophical reason, had brought
Judaism? And was the association of Jewish religion with Greek
philosophy one long error? That would be a hard conclusion, if we had
to admit that Judaism cannot stand the test of contact with foreign
culture. But in truth the Hellenistic interpretation of the Bible, so
long as it was genuinely philosophical, remained loyal to Judaism.
Only when it became hardened into dogma, fixed not only as good
doctr