first treatise that we possess starts abruptly with a comment on the first verse of the second chapter, “’And the heaven and earth and all their world were completed.’  Moses has previously related the creation of the mind and sense, and now he proceeds to describe their perfection.  Their perfection is not the individual mind or sense, but their archetypal ‘ideas.’  And symbolically he calls the mind heaven, because in heaven are the ideas of the mind, and the sense he calls earth, because it is corporeal and material."[99]

So in a rambling, unsystematic way Philo embarks upon a discourse on idealism and psychology, making a fresh start continually from a verse or a phrase of the Bible.  The Biblical narrative in the earliest chapters offered a congenial soil for his explorations, but no ground is too stubborn for his seed.  The genealogy of Noah’s sons is as fertile in suggestion as the story of Adam and Eve, for each name represents some hidden power or possesses some ethical import.

The allegorical commentary is clearly the work of Philo’s maturity, wherein he exhibits full mastery of an original method of exegesis.  His allegories are no longer tentative, and he writes with the confidence of the sage, who has received not only the admiration of his people, but the inspiration of God.  Another sign of their maturity is that asceticism seems no longer the true path to virtue, as it was to the author of “The Lives of the Patriarchs” and “The Specific Laws,” but, on the contrary, a moderate use of the world’s goods and a share in political life are marks of the perfect man.  These characteristics bespeak the firmer hand and the profounder experience.  Yet the series of works which form together Philo’s esoteric doctrine were certainly put together over a long period of years, as the varied political references indicate.  It has indeed been suggested by a modern German scholar[100] that large parts were originally given in the form of detached lectures and sermons, and that Philo later composed them together into a continuous commentary, working them up with much literary elaboration.  In support of this theory, it may be urged that several of the treatises contain political addresses to public audiences, notably the De Agricultura and De Confusione Linguarum, while in others there are invocations to prayer, or a summons to read a passage in the Bible, addressed apparently by the preacher to the Hazan, who had before him the scroll of the law.  From Philo’s own statements we know that the wisest men used to deliver philosophical homilies upon the Bible on the Sabbath day; and it is natural that the man who was appointed to head the Jewish embassy to Gaius had made himself known in the past to his brethren for oratory and wisdom of speech.  “Sermons,” said Jowett, “though they deal with eternal subjects, are the most evanescent form of literature.”  The dictum is true for the most part, but occasionally the sermon, by its depth of thought, the universality