but they abound “in Egypt, in each of its districts, and particularly about Alexandria.”  In every house one room was set aside for worship, reading, and meditation, and here they kept the “inspired declarations of the prophets, and hymns,” they had also “commentaries of ancient men,” who were “the founders of the sect;” “it is highly probable that the ancient commentaries which he says they have, are the very Gospels and writings of the apostles;” Eusebius thinks that none can “be so hardy as to contradict his statement that these Therapeuts were Christians, when their practices are to be found among none but in the religion of Christians;” and “why should we add to these their meetings, and the separate abodes of the men and the women in these meetings, and the exercises performed by them, which are still in vogue among us at the present day, and which, especially at the festival of our Saviour’s passion, we are accustomed to pass in fasting and watching, and in the study of the divine word?  All these the above-mentioned author has accurately described and stated in his writings, and are the same customs that are observed by us alone, at the present day, particularly the vigils of the great festival, and the exercises in them, and the hymns that are commonly recited among us....  Besides this, he describes the grades of dignity among those who administer the ecclesiastical services committed to them, those of the deacons, and the presidencies of the episcopate as the highest.”  Thus Philo wrote of “the original practices handed down from the apostles.”  The important points to notice here are:  that in the time of Philo, these Christians were scattered all over the world; that the commentaries they had, which Eusebius says were the Christian’s gospels, were the works of ancient men, who founded the sect, so that the founders were men who lived long before Philo’s time; that they were thoroughly organised, proving thereby that their sect was not a new one in his day; that the “discipline,” organised association, ranks of priests, etc., implied a long existence of the sect before Philo studied it, and that such existence was clearly not consistent with any persecution being then directed against it.  Philo writes of flourishing and orderly communities, founded by men who had long since passed away, and had bequeathed their writings to their followers for their instruction and guidance.  And what was the date of Philo?  He himself gives us a clear note of time; in A.D. 40 he was sent on an embassy to the Emperor Caligula at Rome, to complain of a persecution to which the Jews were being subjected by Flaccus; he describes himself as being, in A.D. 40, “a grey-headed old man.”  The Rev. J.W.  Lake puts him at sixty-five or seventy years of age at that period, and consequently would place his birth twenty-five or thirty years before the birth of Jesus ("Plato, Philo, and Paul,” by Rev. J.W.  Lake, pp. 33, 34).  Gibbon, in a note to chap. 15, vol. ii. (p. 180), says that “by