exalts Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, above Melchizedek and the high priest, and calls on the Hebrews to gain salvation by faith in the son of God, who died on behalf of the sinful human race.  Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy wisdom;[363] the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus.  So, too, the earliest philosophical exponents of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, may have derived many of their detailed ideas from Philo, but they converted—­one might rather say perverted—­his monotheistic theology into a dogmatic trinitarianism.  They exalted the Logos, to Philo the “God of the imperfect,” and a second-best Deity, to an equal place with the perfect God.  For man, indeed, he was nearer and the true object of human adoration.  And this not only meant a departure from Judaism; it meant a departure from philosophy.  The supreme unity of the pure reason was sacrificed no less than the unity of the soaring religious imagination.  The one transcendental God became again, as He had been to the Greek theologians, an inscrutable impersonal power, who was unknown to man and ruled over the universe by His begotten son, the Logos.  The sublimity of the Hebrew conception, which combines personality with unity, was lost, and the harmony of the intellectual and emotional aspirations achieved by Philo was broken straightway by those who professed to follow him.  The skeleton of his thought was clothed with a body wherein his spirit could never have dwelt.  It was the penalty which Philo paid for vagueness of expression and luxuriance of words that his works became the support of doctrines which he had combated, the guide of those who were opposed to his life’s ideal.

The experience of the Church showed how right was Philo’s judgment when he declared that the rejection of the Torah would produce chaos.  The fourth and fifth centuries exhibit an era of unparalleled disorder and confusion in the religious world,[364] sect struggling with sect, creed with creed, churches rising and falling, dogmas set up by councils and forced upon men’s souls at the point of the Roman sword!  And out of this struggling mass of beliefs and fancies, theologies and superstitions, sects and political forces, there arose a tyrannical, dogmatic Church which laid far heavier burthens on men’s minds than ever the most ruthless Pharisee of the theologian’s imagination had laid upon their body and spirit.  The yoke of the law of Moses, sanctifying the life, had been broken; the fiat of popes and the decrees of synods were the saving beliefs which ensured the Kingdom of Heaven!  Was it to this that the allegorizing of the law, the search for the spirit beneath the letter, the reinterpretation of the holy law of Moses in the light of philosophical reason, had brought Judaism?  And was the association of Jewish religion with Greek philosophy one long