the benefit of all peoples;[352] or[353] that the purpose of Israel’s dispersion was that they might make proselytes.  Philo’s short treatise on “Nobility” is an eloquent plea for the equal treatment of the stranger who joins the true faith; and the author finds in the Bible narratives support for his thesis, that not good birth but the virtue of the individual is the true test of merit.  Of the valuelessness of the one, Cain, Ham, and Esau are types; of the supreme worth of the other, Abraham, who is set up as the model of the excellent man brought up among idolaters, but led by the Divine oracle, revealed to his mind, to embrace the true idea of God.  If the founder of the Hebrew nation was himself a convert, then surely there was a place within the religion for other converts.  Remarkable is the closing note of the book: 

“We should, therefore, blame those who spuriously appropriate as their own merit what they derive from others, good birth; and they should justly be regarded as enemies not only of the Jewish race, but of all mankind; of the Jewish race, because they engender indifference in their brethren, so that they despise the righteous life in their reliance upon their ancestors’ virtue; and of the Gentiles, because they would not allow them their meed of reward even though they attain to the highest excellence of conduct, simply because they have not commendable ancestors.  I know not if there could be a more pernicious doctrine than this:  that there is no punishment for the wicked offspring of good parents, and no reward for the good offspring of evil parents.  The law judges each man upon his own merit, and does not assign praise or blame according to the virtues of the forefathers.”

And, again, he writes:  “God judges by the fruit of the tree, not by the root; and in the Divine judgment the proselyte will be raised on high, and he will have a double distinction, because on earth he ‘deserted’ to God, and later he receives as his reward a place in Heaven."[354]

Unfortunately, the development of missionizing activity, which followed Philo’s epoch, threatening, as it did, the fundamental principles of Judaism, necessitated the reassertion of its national character and antagonism to an attitude which sought expansion by compromise.  It is the tragedy of Philo’s work that his mission to the nations was of necessity distrusted by his own race, and that his appeal for tolerance within the community was turned to a mockery by the hostility which the converts of the next century showed to the national ideas.  Christian apologists early learned to imitate Philo’s allegorical method, and appropriated it to explain away the laws of Moses.  Within a hundred years of Philo’s death, his ideal, at least in the form in which he had conceived it, had been shattered for ages.  While he was preaching a philosophical Judaism for the world at Alexandria, Peter and Paul were preaching through the Diaspora