was created out of it; and pain, and want, and
hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations
crushed, its purity tainted by the passions and
appetites of its companion, the fleshly lusts which waged
perpetual war against it.

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the
question was how to conquer it, or at least how to set
free the spirit from its control.

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread
behind the march of Alexander: but as his generals
could only make their conquests permanent by largely
accepting the Eastern manner, so philosophy could only
make good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised.

The one pure and holy God whom Plato had painfully
reasoned out for himself had existed from immemorial
time in the traditions of the Jews, while the Persians
who had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence
of an independent evil being now had him to
offer to the Greeks as their account of the difficulties
which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of
struggle, and many hundred thousand folios were the
results of the remarkable fusion which followed. Out
of these elements, united in various proportions, rose
successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the Hellenists,
the Therapeute, those strange Essene communists, with
the innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics.
Finally, the battle was limited to the two great rivals,
under one or other of which the best of the remainder
had ranged themselves m Manicheism and Catholic
Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian, Catholicism
in which the Jewish element most preponderated.
It did not end till the close of the fifth century, and it
ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
victory which either side could claim. The Church
has yet to acknowledge how large a portion of its
enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the mediation
of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let
us trace something of the real bearings of this section
of the world's oriental history, which to so many
moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over
words and straws.

Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength
of evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in matter, so
far it was a conclusion which both Jew and Persian
were ready to accept. The naked Aristotelic view of
it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to
the Hellenistic Jew