reason, the vous of Aristotle, and the creator, the Snμiovpyós of Plato. But the distinctive peculiarities of Neo-Platonism were on the subjective side. It was religious as no earlier Greek system, not even the Pythagorean, had been. It was indeed essentially a philosophy doing its best to become a religion. It tried to reach its object by faith, not by reason, by intuition, not by speculation or inference. It believed in ecstasy rather than science, visions, lustrations, mystic rites and symbols rather than open-eyed inquiry and patient study of nature and man. It had indeed a most un-Hellenic but strongly Oriental contempt for the body, and respect for self-denials, penances, and ablutions. Plotinus thought it would be folly to leave to posterity an image of himself, and so would not allow his portrait to be painted, or even tell the day of his birth, the names of his parents or his native land. It is true the Neo-Platonists were ostentatiously Greek, but they were it as Philo was ostentatiously Hebrew. Their system was evolved from the ancient mythologies and philosophies, as his had been from Moses, by a method of interpretation which left the interpreted at the mercy of the interpreter. Neo-Platonism was a splendid and even tragic endeavour of Greek philosophy to appropriate, disguise in its own forms, and turn to its own uses Semitic religion. Julian was at once the symbol of its history and the prophecy of its fate. It died while still young, amid forces it had tried at once to assimilate and resist, conquered by the Galilean, the

religion of the future, which no philosophy of the past could either express or vanquish.

It does not fall within the scope of this paper to discuss the conception of God evolved and formulated in the Christian schools of Alexandria. But this much may be said—it was, perhaps, the most notable result of the meeting of Semitic belief and Indo-European thought. The one supplied the facts and the faith that had to be interpreted, but the other the interpretation. The influence of Neo-Platonic philosophy on Christian theology has been well, though it can hardly be said sufficiently, discussed, especially on what may be termed its negative side. There is no harder problem either in religion or philosophy than, How ought we to conceive God? How can He be made an object at once of thought and of love and worship? The reason ever tends to deprive Deity of the qualities that win the heart and touch the imagination. As He is refined by the one He becomes lost to the others. Thought, too, can ill conceive the relation of the Infinite to the finite. Are not these indeed contradictory and mutually exclusive notions? Does not infinite by its very nature exclude finite Being? God must be absolutely perfect; but how can an absolutely perfect Being be a Creator? Does not creation imply that He was either less. than perfect before or more than perfect after it? Then, if to escape the difficulties of Atheistic Dualism, thought falls back on a theistic Monism, what is the result? It

may evolve an Akosmism or Theopantism, which is but the apotheosis of nature; or an Emanationism, which makes the universe of phenomenal and finite Being an efflux of the real and infinite. But Deity so universalized and transformed is Deity annihilated Pantheism and Pankosmism are but the ideal and real sides of the same thought. The pantheist is a metaphysician, the pankosmist a physicist, and are distinguished by what is but a verbal difference. In neither case can what occupies the place of Deity be an ethical and personal Being.

Now, ancient thought had conspicuously failed to find a God the reason could acknowledge and the heart love. The Hebrews had believed in a personal God and Creator, but they had been intuitive theists, not rational philosophers. The Judeo-Greek school had discovered the difficulty of conceiving the relation of God to the world, and had tried to vanquish it by the fiction of a semi-personal, semi-impersonal Logos, graduated orders of being, losing in divinity as they retreated from the divine. Neo-Platonism had felt the difficulty in a much more eminent degree. Their Absolute was too absolute to be in any way limited or qualified; their Perfect too perfect to sustain any relation to an imperfect creation or creature. As he was made inconceivable, he was made inaccessible; as he was denuded of qualities, he ceased to be a Being that could be reached by the reason, represented by the thought, or loved by the heart. So their idea of God

He

helped the evolution of the Christian conception by showing what God ought not to be, how He might live in name while He was in reality dead. And with this other and more positive influences combined, eminently the influences of the great Christian facts, which were interpreted as revelations of the sublimest ethical qualities and relations in the Godhead. God was conceived as a unity, but not as a simplicity; as an absolute, but as an absolute to whom relations were immanent and essential. He was a Being capable of loving, capable of being loved; for by a necessity of His nature He had been eternally at once object and subject of love. He could know and be known; for to be as He was and what He was, was to be both the known and the knower. could act, for action was necessary to His essence. The impossibility, that had so perplexed ancient thought, of conceiving an unchangeable related to the changing, the impassible related to the passible, was overcome by the idea that made the active and transient relations to the universe but the transcript of the relations living and immanent in God. The Christian theologians, with genuine, though unconscious, genius, concerned themselves with the objective problem, How God ought to be conceived, not with the subjective, Whether and how man could know Him. Their question was theological, not psychological; and they tried so to deal with it as to lift the idea of God from a rigid and barren abstraction into a living and fruit

ful thought. And so, significantly enough, a new theology was struggling into being, while the philosophy which had gathered into it the noblest elements of the older systems was passing its meridian and beginning to slope slowly to the west and eternal night.

3.

There is, perhaps, no more extraordinary phenomenon in history than the sudden emergence from obscurity to empire of the Arabs. "While Europe had been marching for centuries in the way of progress and development, immobility had been the distinctive characteristic of the innumerable tribes who wander with their tents and herds over the vast and arid deserts of Arabia."* They had been untouched by the waves of conquest, by the revolutions of thought and religion that had been sweeping round and carrying away the ancient civilized nations. As their fathers had been they were, without a literature, without a polity, a multitude of kingless tribes, who each said, “ We know no master but the Master of the universe." Yet, at the very time when the progress of Europe was stayed and decay was superseding development, this nation of isolated and independent tribes, stationary and illiterate for so many centuries, suddenly issued from its deserts, spread like a resistless stream northward, eastward and westward, till it could boast an empire from the Atlantic to the plains

*

Dozy., "Hist. des Musulmans d'Espagne," vol. i. p. 1.