error?  That would be a hard conclusion, if we had to admit that Judaism cannot stand the test of contact with foreign culture.  But in truth the Hellenistic interpretation of the Bible, so long as it was genuinely philosophical, remained loyal to Judaism.  Only when it became hardened into dogma, fixed not only as good doctrine, but as the only saving doctrine, as the tree of life opposed to the Torah, the tree of death—­only then did it become anti-Jewish, and appear as a bastard offspring of the Hebraic God-idea and Greek culture.  Nor should it be forgotten that the Christian theology and the Christian conception of religion are a falling away also from the highest Hellenic ideas; for to Plato as well God was a purely spiritual unity, and religion “a system of morality based upon a law of conduct and touched with emotion.”  In Philo, as we have seen, the Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of God touch at their summits in their noblest expressions; the conceptions of Plato are interfused with the imagination of the prophets.  The Christian theology was a descent to a commoner Hellenism—­or one should rather call it a commoner syncretism—­as well as to an easier, impurer Hebraism.

It must not be put down to the fault of the Septuagint or the allegorists or Philo that the Alexandrian development of Judaism led on to Roman Christianity.  It is to be ascribed rather to the infirmity of human nature, which requires the ideas of its inspired teachers and peoples to be brought down to the common understanding, and causes the progress towards universal religion to be a slow growth.  The masses of the Alexandrian Jews in his own day cannot have grasped his teaching; for Philo, to some degree, lived in a narrow world of philosophical idealism, and he did not calculate the forces which opposed and made impossible the spread of his faith in its integrity.  He was aiming at what was and must for long remain unattainable—­the establishment among the peoples of philosophical monotheism.

No man is a prophet in his own land—­or in his own time—­and because Philo has in him much of the prophet, he seems to have failed.  But it is the burden of our mission to sow in tears that we may reap in joy.  And the work of the Alexandrian-Jewish school may be sad from one aspect of Jewish history, but it is nevertheless one of the dominating incidents of our religious annals.  It did not succeed in bringing over the world to the pure idea of God, but it did help in undermining cruder paganism.  It brought the nations nearer to God, and it introduced Hebraism into the thought of the Western peoples.  It marked, therefore, a great step in the religious work of Israel; yet by the schools of rabbis who felt the hard hand of its offspring upon their people it was regarded as a long misfortune, to be blotted from memory.  What seemed so ominous to them was that the annihilation of the nation came at the same time as the cleavage in the religion.  Judaism seemed attacked no less by internal foes than