ntre of
Jewish life, religious and social, which was a powerful influence in
civilization and united the Jews in every land. And this gave a
catholicity to their development and a standard for their teaching which
the scattered communities of Jews to-day do not possess. None the less
Philo's ideal of Judaism as religion and life is an ideal for our time
and for all time. Its keynote is that Israel is a holy people, a kingdom
of priests, which has a special function for humanity. And the
performance of this function demands the religious-philosophical
ordering of life. From the negative side Philo stands for the struggle
against Epicureanism, which in other words is the devotion to material
pleasures and sensual enjoyments. In adversity, as he notes, the race is
truest to its ideals, but as soon as the breeze of prosperity has caught
its sails, then it throws overboard all that ennobles life. The hedonist
whom he attacks, like the Epicuros ([Hebrew: 'fikuros]) of the rabbis,
is not the banal thinker of one particular age, but a permanent type in
the history of our people. We seem to spend nearly all our moral
strength in the resistance of persecution, and with tranquillity from
without comes degradation within. Emancipation, which should be but a
means to the realization of the higher life, is taken as an end, and
becomes the grave of idealism. With a reiteration that becomes almost
wearisome, but which is the measure of the need for the warning, Philo
protests against this desecration of life, of liberty, and of Judaism.
His position is, that a free and cultured Jewry must pursue the mission
of Israel alike by the example of the righteous life devoted to the
service of God, and by the preaching of God's revealed word. This is his
"burden of the word of the Lord" to the worldly-wise and the
materialists of civilized Alexandria--and to Jews of other lands.

From the positive side Philo stands for the spiritual significance of
the religion. Judaism, which lays stress upon the law, the ceremonial,
and the customs of our forefathers, is threatened at times with the
neglect of the inward religion and the hardness of legalism. Not that
the law, when it is understood, kills the spirit or fetters the
feelings, but a formal observance and an unenlightened insistence upon
the letter may crush the soul which good habits should nurture.
Religion at its highest must be the expression of the individual soul
within, not the acceptance