of a law from without. Although Philo's
estimate of the Torah is from the historical and philological
standpoint uncritical, in the religious sense it is finely critical
inasmuch as it searches out true values. Philo looks in every
ordinance of the Bible for the spiritual light and conceives the law
as an inspiration of spiritual truth and the guide to God, or, as he
puts it sometimes, "the mystagogue to divine ecstasy." For the crown
of life to him is the saint's union with God. In mysticism religion
and philosophy blend, for mysticism is the philosophical form of
faith. Just as the Torah to Philo has an outward and an inward
meaning, so, too, has the religion of the Torah; and the outward
Judaism is the symbol, the necessary bodily expression of the inward,
even as the words of Moses are the symbol, the suggestive expression
of the deeper truth behind them. Yet mystic and spiritual as he is,
Philo never allows religion to sink into mere spirituality, because he
has a true appreciation and a real love for the law. The Torah is the
foundation of Judaism, and one of the three pillars of the universe,
as the rabbis said; and neither the philosopher nor the mystic in
Philo ever causes him to forget that Judaism is a religion of conduct
as well as of belief, and that the law of righteousness is a law which
must be practiced and show itself in active life. He holds fast,
moreover, to the catholicity of Judaism, which restrains the
individual from abrogating observance till the united conscience of
the race calls for it; unless progress comes in this ordered way, the
reformer will produce chaos.

Philo is conservative then in practice, but he is pre-eminently
liberal in thought. The perfect example himself of the assimilation of
outside culture, he demands that Judaism shall always seek out the
fullest knowledge, and in the light of the broadest culture of the age
constantly reinterpret its religious ideas and its holy books. Above
all it must be philosophical, for philosophy is "the breath and finer
spirit of all knowledge," and it vivifies the knowledge of God as well
as the knowledge of human things. Without it religion becomes bigoted,
faith obscurantist, and ceremony superstitious. But the Jew does not
merely borrow ideas or accept his philosophy ready-made from his
environment; he interprets it afresh according to his peculiar
God-idea and his conception of God's relation to man, and thereby
makes it a genuine Jewish p