It is possible that an extremist section of the Jews pressed the letter of the law to excess, so as to lose its spirit, but the opposite excess, into which Paul plunged the new faith, was as narrow.  It involved a glorification of belief, which did not imply any relation to conduct.  Philo had pleaded no less earnestly than the Apostle for the reliance upon grace and the saving virtue of faith, but he did not therefore absolve men from the law which made for righteousness.[359] And lest it be thought that the stress laid upon faith was peculiar to Hellenizing Judaism, we have only to note such passages as Dr. Schechter has adduced from the early Midrash on the rabbinic conception.[360] “Great was the merit of faith which Israel put in God; for it was by the merit of this faith that the Holy Spirit came over them, and they said the [Hebrew:  shira], (i.e., the Song of Moses) to God, as it is said, ’And they believed in the Lord and His servant Moses.  Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord.’” Or again[361]—­and the passage reminds us still more strongly of both Philo and Christian Gospel—­“Our Father Abraham came into the possession of this world and the world hereafter only by the merit of his faith.”

What is new in the Christian position is not the magnifying of faith; it is the severance of faith from the law and the particular faith which is magnified.  Philo, and the rabbis, too, believed that faith was the goal of virtue, and the culmination of the moral life; but faith to them implied the sanctification of the whole of life, the love of God “shown in obedience to a law of conduct.”  Paul, however, hating the law, set up a new faith in the saving power of Jesus and in certain beliefs about him, which afterwards were crystallized, or petrified, into merciless dogmas, contrary alike to the Jewish ideas of God and of life.  The new religion, when it was denationalized, inevitably became ecclesiastical:  for as the national regulation of life was rejected, in order to ensure some kind of uniformity, it had to bind its members together by definite articles of belief imposed by a central authority.  The true alternative was not between a legal and a spiritual religion—­for every religion must have some external rule—­but between a law of conduct and a law of belief.  Philo and the rabbis chose the former way; Paul and the Church, the latter.  Christian theology, no less than the Christian conception of religion, exhibits also a complete breach with the Jewish spirit of Philo.  In the Epistles there are, indeed, in many places doctrines of the Logos in the same images and the same Hebraic metaphors as Philo had worked into his system; but their purport is entirely changed by association with new un-Jewish dogmas.  Philo, allegorizing,[362] had seen the holy Word typified in the high priest, and in Melchizedek, the priest of the Most High; he had called it the son of God and His first-born.  Paul, dogmatizing,