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turned from the impossible or the delusive to do and to be satisfied with the probably best.

Now, it can only be the shallowest of all possible, criticisms that seeks to estimate Greek philosophy by its inglorious end, though its end is not so inglorious as

it seems. The problem was too complex and immense to be solved by the minds that first essayed it; but their essay has been at once the basis of every other and the stimulus to it. Their very failure was in one respect a splendid success-made their work the more creative of mental action and the energy and growth it brings. It was not possible that thinkers *starting from the simple premiss which was the implicit principle of all Greek thought should have solved the problem of existence. It had not been good had it been possible. Man had more to gain by the search after truth than by its premature discovery; and Greece has been at once a leader and a light in the search.

"Die Wahrheit ist in Gott,
Uns bleibt das Forschen,"

and we thankfully confess our obligations to the great thinkers who have so directed and strengthened us in our quest.

2.

The point our discussion next reaches is one where the Semitic family and the Greek people seem alike

broken and powerless. Rome has conquered and rules. Freedom and philosophy have together forsaken Greece; and can hardly be said to live in Rome. Cicero has written elegant, if not very profound or original, disquisitions on various things philosophical. Lucretius has sung the praises of Epicurus, and done his best to show how atoms could become a world. Stoicism, a creed congenial to the sterner Roman spirit, is making, and is for long to continue to make, noble men in swiftly degenerating times. But philosophy, as a creative search after truth, has not found a home in the imperial city, and is looking for one elsewhere. The Semitic family seems doomed; its great nations are either dead or dying. Assyria has ceased to be. Phoenicia, aged, withered, feeble, is hardly alive. Carthage is eclipsed; against her the delenda est had gone forth. Israel, proud, subject, weeping under an alien king, sits cold in the lengthening shadow of national extinction, and scarcely dares to dream of her ancient hopes. Hebrew has died; Aramæan lives. Syrians are everywhere, swarm in the capital,

"In Tiberim defluxit Orontes,"

and are everywhere useful, used, trusted, despised. The Jew is becoming a citizen of the world, has penetrated to India, to China even, has quarters and colonies in every city of the empire, can count his thousands in Rome and Alexandria. In Nazareth one who shall

make the name of Jew at once illustrious and infamous for all time, is beginning to move to love or hate the minds of men. In Tarsus a youth is awakening to the world about him, asking many things, what it is to be, to be a Jew, a Greek. Everywhere within the old the seeds of a new order are falling, and shall yet fructify, causing death while creating life.

In Alexandria the thoughts and faiths of men from many lands met and mingled. The Greeks were the sons of the men who had followed Alexander, more cosmopolitan than the old Hellenes had been. Yet they loved, as men ever do when planted on a foreign soil, to glorify their fatherland, and to enrich themselves with the treasures of its genius. The literature of Greece was collected in Alexandria, and the place felt the inspiration of its presence. There were, too, in the city children of the soil, sons of the ancient empire, contributing their quota to the collective mind and its wealth. There, too, were Jews, many thousands of them, breathing the spirit of the place. They were far from Judea, and by and by its polity, institutions, temple, worship, even its speech, grew strange to them. Without these, Judaism tended to become less a formal authority, more a quickening spirit. The rabbinical tradition was broken; the inflexible sacerdotalism of home was softened. The Scriptures were translated into Greek; and the new speech created a new order of

ideas. The old tongue had been sacred, had preserved many distinctive and exclusive associations; but the new tongue was at once common and classical, the tongue of the market and the schools. The place Hellenized the men, and the language their Scriptures. In the museums, libraries, and academies they studied the literature of Greece; and in the synagogue they heard the Book their fathers had revered as the Word of God speak to them in Greek. Plato was read with eyes accustomed to Moses, and Moses with eyes accustomed to Plato, and a spirit whose existence was before unguessed was unsphered in both. Hebrew faith and Greek science were alike loved. Heathen wisdom was made an effluence of the divine. The antitheses or incompatibilities of the letter were overcome by a method of interpretation which left the interpreter fancy free, able to make the words and records of the past reflect the mind of the present. The philosophy of Greece was evolved from Moses, and the God of Moses was proved to have lived, ruled, and been believed in Greece.

The Judeo-Greek philosophy, whatever may be thought of its intrinsic worth, must be judged of the highest historical importance. In it Semitic religion and Greek knowledge consciously met and consciously tried to unite. Philo's system may be in the highest degree artificial and arbitrary. His allegorical interpretations may be forced, fanciful, often ridiculous. He may have put too much of Plato into Moses, too much of Moses into Plato. His

notion of Deity may have been crude and inconsistent. He may have too absolutely translated the Hebrew idea of the inexpressible Name into the Greek idea of the inconceivable Being. His method of establishing relations between the Absolute and the relative, God and the world, may have been violent and without any basis in reason. But once criticism has said its last word against his system, it still remains true that he and his school mark the beginning of a new era in the history of philosophy and philosophic thought. They have about equal significance for Neo-Greek philosophy and Christian theology, prepared the way for both, and made the work of both more possible, supplying in the one case new principles and premisses, in the other appropriate and appropriable modes of thought and speech.

Neo-Platonism may be said to be, in a sense, an attempt to construe from the Greek side and in the Greek method Semitic faith, as Philo's had been an attempt from the Judaic side to translate Greek philosophy into Hebrew religion. It was certainly rooted in the older Greek thought, owed much to the Eleatics, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics. Its problems, too, were, in great part, the same, yet significantly construed from the subjective rather than the objective side. It tried to conceive Being, absolute and relative, as some of the older schools had done, so combining their once independent and opposed ideas as to form its own Trinity, the abstract or pure Being of the Eleatics, the

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