by external calamity; and was likely to perish altogether or to drift into a lower conception of God, unless it could find some stalwart defence.  Hence they insisted on the extension of the fence of the law, and abandoned for centuries the mission of the Jews to the outer world.  This was the true Galut, or exile; not so much the political exclusion from the land of their fathers, but the enforced exclusion from the mission of the prophets.  Philo is one of the brightest figures of a golden age of Jewish expansion, which passed away of a sudden, and has never since returned.  In the silver and bronze ages which followed, his place in Judaism was obscured.  But this age of ours, which boasts of its historical sense, looking back over the centuries and freed from the bitter dismay of the rabbis, can appraise his true worth and see in him one who realized for himself all that Judaism and Jewish culture could and still can be.

Some Jewish teachers have thought that Philo’s work was a failure, others that it provides a warning rather than an example for later generations of Jews, proving the mischief of expanding Judaism for the world.  As well one might say that Isaiah’s prophecy was a calamity, because the Christian synoptics used his words as evidences of Christianity.  What is universal in Jewish literature is in the fullest sense Jewish, and we should beware of renouncing our inheritance because others have abused and perverted it.  Other critics, again, say that Philo is wearisome and prolix, artificial and sophisticated.  There is certainly some truth in this judgment; but Philo has many beautiful passages which compensate.  Part of his message was for his own generation and the Alexandrian community, and with the passing away of the Hellenistic culture, it has lost its attraction.  But part of it is of universal import, and is very pertinent and significant for every generation of Jews which, enjoying social and intellectual emancipation, lives amid a foreign culture.  Doubtless the position of Philo and the Alexandrian community was to some extent different from that of the Jews at any time since the greater Diaspora that followed the destruction of the temple.  They had behind them a national culture and a centre of Jewish life, religious and social, which was a powerful influence in civilization and united the Jews in every land.  And this gave a catholicity to their development and a standard for their teaching which the scattered communities of Jews to-day do not possess.  None the less Philo’s ideal of Judaism as religion and life is an ideal for our time and for all time.  Its keynote is that Israel is a holy people, a kingdom of priests, which has a special function for humanity.  And the performance of this function demands the religious-philosophical ordering of life.  From the negative side Philo stands for the struggle against Epicureanism, which in other words is the devotion to material pleasures and sensual enjoyments.  In adversity, as he notes,