to the heathen, but it utterly breaks the continuity of development.  Paul himself was little of a philosopher, and those to whom he preached were not usually philosophical communities such as Philo addressed at Alexandria, but congregations of half converted, superstitious pagans.  The philosophical exposition of the law was too difficult for them, while the observance of the law in its strictness demanded too great a sacrifice.  The spiritual teaching of Jesus was dissociated by his Apostle from its source, and the break with Judaism was deliberate and complete.  The fanatical zest of the missionary dominated him, and he proclaimed distinctly where the new Hebraism which was offered to the Gentile should depart from the historic religion of the Jews:  “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth,"[356] he says to the Romans; and to the Galatians:  “As many as are of the works of the law are under the curse."[357] “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law....  But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up with the faith which should afterwards be revealed.  Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ that we might be justified by faith.  But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”  Paul’s position then—­and he is the forerunner of dogmatic Christianity—­involved a rejection of the Torah; and it is this which above all else constituted his cleavage from both Judaism and the Philonic presentation of it.

Philo is commonly regarded as the forerunner of Christian teaching, and it is doubtless true that he suggested to the Church Fathers parts of their theology, and represented also the missionary spirit which inspired the teaching of some Apostles.  But it must be clearly understood that he shared still more the spirit of Hillel, whose maxim was “to love thy fellow-creatures and draw them near to the Torah,” and that he would have been fundamentally opposed to the new missionary attitude of Paul.  The doctrines of the Epistle to the Romans, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, are absolutely antipathetic to the ideal of the “Allegories of the Laws.”  Paul is allied in spirit—­though his expression is that of the fanatic rather than of the philosopher—­to the extreme allegorist section of philosophical Jews at Alexandria, attacked by Philo for their shallowness in the famous passage, quoted from De Migratione Abrahami (ch. 16[358]), who, because they recognized the spiritual meaning of the law, rejected its literal commands; because they saw that circumcision symbolized the abandonment of the sensual life, no longer observed the ceremony.  The same antinomian spirit is shown in the Epistle to the Galatians by the allegory of the children whom Abraham had by Hagar the bondwoman and Sarah the free wife:  “For there are the two covenants, the one from the mount of Sinai which gendereth to bondage, which is Hagar....  But we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.”  To Philo the law and the observance of the letter were the high-road to freedom and the Divine spirit, and, remaining loyal to the Jewish conception of religion, for all his philosophical outlook, he said:  “The rejection of the [Greek:  Nomos] will produce chaos in our lives.”  To Paul the law was an obstacle to the spread of religious truth and a fetter to the spiritual life of the individual.