that St. John adopted the term Дóros from Philo, and was even influenced by Philo's doctrine of the Aóros, the main point is whether both writers attach the same meaning to the term. As we shall see, this is by no means the case; and, though historical curiosity would fain be satisfied, in the development of ideas the question is of very subordinate interest. No one will now maintain that the truth of the Дóros doctrine as held by St. John is dependent upon the writer not having been influenced by Philo; for, however he may have been influenced, he employed it to formulate a new idea, which came into the world only with Christianity.

I have mentioned two difficulties which confront any one who seeks to explain the doctrine of Philo and to estimate his influence. There is another difficulty, which arises from the general character of human progress. Philo presupposes two independent lines of development, the Jewish and the Greek. He is thus connected, on the one hand with Jewish, and on the other hand with Greek thought, and it is impossible to understand him fully without some reference to both. Now, it is obviously impossible to treat fully of either; and the most that I can pretend to do is to indicate, as we proceed, the relation of particular ideas to these two lines of development. Without more preamble, I shall attempt to convey some idea of part of Philo's De opificio mundi, as the handiest way of getting an insight into the circle of ideas within which this expositor of Hellenistic Judaism lived and moved.

Philo begins his treatise on the Creation of the World by drawing a strong contrast between Moses and other legislators. The first thing to be observed is Philo's belief that the Mosaic writings contain a complete revelation of God, and are absolutely true even in the most minute particular. The Law of Moses is therefore unchangeable and eternal, and will remain as long as the sun and moon and the universe lasts. Nor is it merely the Hebrew scriptures which are thus inspired, but the same authority attaches to the Septuagint. No scribe of the straitest sect of the Pharisees had a more implicit faith than Philo in the inspiration of every word and even letter of Scripture.

Since the Mosaic writings, on his view, contain a final revelation of the nature of God and His relation to the world, it fol

lows that they contain all truth, and hence that whatever is true can be extracted from a careful consideration of what they affirm. The distinction between religious and scientific truth, which many liberal theologians now make, was one which did not occur to Philo, and which, if it had been presented to him, he would have summarily rejected as impious. As the passage just referred to shows, it is just the "philosophical" character of the Mosaic writings which constitutes their superiority to all other writings. For Philo the Pentateuch is not merely an expression of the religious conciousness, but a philosophical system, in which each part is set forth with a view to the other parts; in other words, the Bible is not merely a record of religious experience, but a theology. In Philo's hands, in fact, it becomes almost entirely a theology, even the narrative parts being regarded as part of a system of general conceptions. With this method of dealing with scripture we are only too familiar, and it was mainly through Philo's example and influence that it became the favourite method of Christian writers, and has survived down to our own. day.

The first class of legislators contrasted with Moses are those who simply state ethical principles without showing the basis upon which they depend. We may express Philo's meaning by saying that morality must be based upon religion. When moral precepts are laid down without being shown to flow from the relation of God to the world, and especially to man, it is not seen that the rational nature of man demands something more than external commands. It is for this reason, he holds, that Moses begins by revealing the nature of God, and thus prepares the minds of men for a joyous obedience to the laws.

The second class of lawgivers are those who do, indeed, attempt to exhibit the divine nature, but distort it by the invention of myths, which give a false idea of God. To Philo a myth is simply a deliberate attempt to impose upon the credulous masses. It is significant that Philo, while he here supposes that he is following his favourite philosopher, Plato, in reality displays a different spirit. To Plato, and even more to Aristotle, a myth was a noble lie'; it was the first attempt of the human mind to grasp the divine nature, and though Plato criticises the myths of his country, he is willing to allow that they may be made an

important instrument in the education of the young. Aristotle, again, finds in mythology an implicit philosophy; so that the mythologist, as he says, is in a sense a philosopher. Philo has not this wide range of sympathy. As a Jew he can see in the myths of polytheistic religions nothing but a false representation of the one invisible God. If it is asked how Philo, familiar as he was with the anthropomorphic representation of God found in the Pentateuch was not able to find an element of truth in Greek and Oriental mythologies, the answer is that he spiritualised these sayings, and thus eliminated from them the obnoxious element. He therefore distinguishes between allegory and mythology. He admits that, in the Pentateuch, there are things 'more incredible than myths' (de Mose iii. 691); but the incredibility arises from interpreting literally what was meant by the writer to be understood in an allegorical sense. To suppose that God really planted fruit trees in Paradise, when no one was allowed to live there, and when it would be impious to fancy that he required them for himself, is "great and incurable silliness." The reference must, therefore, be to the paradise of virtues, with their appropriate actions, implanted by God in the soul (De Plan. Noe. 8. 9.). The objections of cavillers were set aside by a similar process. There were those who sneered at the story of the tower of Babel, and thought it parallel to Homer's tale about Pelion, Ossa and Olympus. "The true interpretation is that which sees in the account a portrayal of the universal nature and course of wickedness." (De Conf. Linguar. 1 ff.) This allegorical method of interpretation is so imbedded in the writings of Philo, from whom it spread to the Fathers of the Church, that it may be well to say a few words about it.

The allegorical method was to a certain extent employed in the Palestinian schools, but it had its origin in Greece, and was borrowed by later Græco-Jewish writers. The reverence for antiquity and the belief in inspiration imparted to the writings of the ancient poets a unique value. Thus, Homer became the Bible of the Greek races, and was sometimes regarded as not only inspired but as divine. With the rise of philosophic reflection, Homer was held to contain a full system of philosophy. As new ideas took possession of men's minds, the only method of

reconciliation that seemed satisfactory was to give a symbolical interpretation to passages which offended the moral sense. This method was aided by the concomitant development of the mysteries, in which the history of the gods was represented by symbolical actions. In the 5th century B.C. the allegorical interpretation began to be applied to ancient literature. Thus Hecataeus explained the story of Cerberus by the existence of a poisonous snake found in a cavern on the headland of Tænarum. Anaxagoras found in Homer a symbolical account of the movements of mental powers and moral virtues: Zeus was mind, Athene was art. His disciple Metrodorus treated Homeric stories as a symbolical representation of physical phenomena. "The gods were the powers of nature; their gatherings, their movements, their loves and their battles, were the play and interaction and apparent strife of natural forces."

Now, the same difficulty which had been felt in the Greek world in regard to Homer was felt by the Jews who had studied Greek philosophy in regard to the Pentateuch. Hence, in Philo's time the allegorical method had attained a firm footing among Græco-Jewish writers. In the Wisdom of Solomon, it is said that Wisdom, at the time of the Exodus, led the Israelites in a wonderful path, "and became to them a shelter by day and a flame of stars by night." Here the pillar of cloud and of fire is allegorized as Wisdom. The writer, however, does not apply the method to the construction and proof of doctrines. But it was inevitable that a thinker like Philo should follow his favourite writers the Stoics, and interpret the sacred writings in terms of the philosophical doctrines which he had learned from his Greek teachers. In this way he was able to retain his belief in the absolute authority of Moses and at the same time to satisfy his intellect. But Philo lacks the keen insight of Plato and Aristotle, who rejected the symbolic interpretation of the poets, and was entirely unaware that he was reading into the sacred writings ideas that he had brought to them. The allegorical method, though it has obscured the deeper truth of the scriptures for centuries, was not without its value; for in no other way could the essential truth which they contained have been retained by an age that had advanced to a higher stage of development.

Philo, coming to the account of creation contained in Genesis, proceeds to characterise it in terms borrowed from the Platonic philosophy. For Plato the true reality consisted in 'ideas,' which in the Timaeus he conceives as the thoughts of God as they existed in the divine mind before the creation of the world.' This is the aspect of the Platonic ideas upon which Philo naturally fastened, because it best fitted in with his general conception of the transcendence of God and His relation to the visible universe. As we shall immediately see more fully, the world first exists as a connected system of ideas in the divine intelligence, and this system is then impressed upon the visible creation, which Philo conceives as distinct and separate from the system of ideas,-the zoopos vontós as he usually calls it. We can easily understand how a mind like Philo's, filled with the Jewish conception of God as transcending all finite existence, found in the Platonic conception of archetypal ideas a philosophical expression for the relation between God and the world. The creation he therefore conceived, not as a manifestation of God himself, but as the product of his creative power and wisdom, exhibiting traces of its divine model, in the same way as a building or statue is the outward realisation of ideas previously existing in the mind of the architect or sculptor. It is worthy of remark that, in thus assimilating Jewish and Greek ideas, Philo is unconsciously transforming the distinctively Jewish conception of God. When the creation of the world is assimilated to the product of human art, the conception of God is not that of a Creator, but of a Divine Architect, who fashions a material already existing. That this idea lay at the basis of Philo's thought is proved by the fact that, as we shall see, he regards matter, not as created but as eternal. Now, this is not the Jewish idea of creation; nor can it be legitimately extracted from the Mosaic account. In Genesis the world is conceived to spring into being as a whole at the word of God, and to depend for its continued existence upon his will. What He has summoned into being He may at a word annihilate. Philo, overmastered by the Greek conception of God, not as the creator, but as the former of the world, is naturally led to read the scriptural account of creation as if it was the account of the fashioning of an ordered world out of a pre-existent material. Thus the Greek