ine, but as the only saving doctrine, as the tree of life opposed
to the Torah, the tree of death--only then did it become anti-Jewish,
and appear as a bastard offspring of the Hebraic God-idea and Greek
culture. Nor should it be forgotten that the Christian theology and
the Christian conception of religion are a falling away also from the
highest Hellenic ideas; for to Plato as well God was a purely
spiritual unity, and religion "a system of morality based upon a law
of conduct and touched with emotion." In Philo, as we have seen, the
Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of God touch at their summits in
their noblest expressions; the conceptions of Plato are interfused
with the imagination of the prophets. The Christian theology was a
descent to a commoner Hellenism--or one should rather call it a
commoner syncretism--as well as to an easier, impurer Hebraism.

It must not be put down to the fault of the Septuagint or the
allegorists or Philo that the Alexandrian development of Judaism led
on to Roman Christianity. It is to be ascribed rather to the infirmity
of human nature, which requires the ideas of its inspired teachers and
peoples to be brought down to the common understanding, and causes the
progress towards universal religion to be a slow growth. The masses of
the Alexandrian Jews in his own day cannot have grasped his teaching;
for Philo, to some degree, lived in a narrow world of philosophical
idealism, and he did not calculate the forces which opposed and made
impossible the spread of his faith in its integrity. He was aiming at
what was and must for long remain unattainable--the establishment
among the peoples of philosophical monotheism.

No man is a prophet in his own land--or in his own time--and because
Philo has in him much of the prophet, he seems to have failed. But it
is the burden of our mission to sow in tears that we may reap in joy.
And the work of the Alexandrian-Jewish school may be sad from one
aspect of Jewish history, but it is nevertheless one of the dominating
incidents of our religious annals. It did not succeed in bringing over
the world to the pure idea of God, but it did help in undermining
cruder paganism. It brought the nations nearer to God, and it
introduced Hebraism into the thought of the Western peoples. It
marked, therefore, a great step in the religious work of Israel; yet
by the schools of rabbis who felt the hard hand of its offspring upon
their people it was regarded as a lon