beliefs; but they failed to maintain a true harmony between the two.  The cultures of all countries and races mingled, even as their peoples mingled under the Roman Empire, but they were so combined as to lose the purity and individuality of each element.  The Eastern Platonists who followed Philo brought to their interpretation less noble conceptions of the Godhead, the Gnosticism of Syria, the dualism of Persia, the impersonal pantheism of India, and the theurgies of Egypt, and produced strange hybrids of the human mind.  The one point of agreement between them is that they conceive the Supreme God as impersonal and entirely inactive, “a deified Zero,” and endeavor by a system of emanation to trace the descent of this baffling principle into man and the universe.  Philo was as unfortunate in his philosophical as in his religious following, who both transformed his poetical metaphors into fixed and rigid dogmas.  His doctrine of the Logos was, on the one hand, the forerunner of the Trinity of the Church, on the other of the Trinity of the Alexandrian neo-Platonists.  It is difficult, indeed, to trace with certainty the connection between Philo and the later school of Alexandrian Platonists, but there appears to be at least one clear link in the teaching of the Syrian Numenius, who flourished in the middle of the second century.  To him are attributed the two sayings:  “Either Plato Philonizes or Philo Platonizes,” and “What is Plato but the Attic Moses?” Modern scholars have questioned the correctness of the reference, but be this as it may, it is certain that Numenius used the Bible as evidence of Platonic doctrines.  “We should go back,” he says, in a fragment, “to the actual writings of Plato and call in as testimony the ideas of the most cultured races; comparing their holy books and laws we should bring in support the harmonious ideas which are to be found among the Brahmans and the Jews."[278] Origen tells us,[279] moreover, that he often introduced excerpts from the books of Moses and the Prophets, and allegorized them with ingenuity.  In one of the few remains of his writings which have come down to us, we find him praising the verse in the first chapter of Genesis, “The spirit of God was upon the waters”; because, as Philo had interpreted it—­following perhaps a rabbinical tradition—­water represents the primal world-stuff.  And elsewhere he mentions the efforts of the Egyptian magicians to frustrate the miracles of Moses, following Philo’s account in his life of the Jewish hero.

The work of Philo helped to spread a knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures far and wide and to give them general authority as a philosophical book; but it did not succeed in spreading the pure Hebrew monotheism.  The exalted Hebrew idea of God was still too sublime for the pagan nations, even for their philosophers.  The world in truth was decaying morally and intellectually, and most of all in powers of imagination; and its hunger for God found expression in crude and stunted