But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a sign—­perhaps a cause—­of the decline of the existing religion.  The study of man superseded the study of nature:  a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an importance the intensity of which made every other question insignificant.  How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his creation, these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity of every thinker.  Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be, the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it—­whether matter was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance.  God would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose.  Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and hunger, and suffering.  Worse than all, the spirit in its material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion, the fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against it.

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to conquer it, or at least how to set free the spirit from its control.

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of Alexander:  but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent by largely accepting the Eastern manner, so philosophy could only make good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised.

The one pure and holy God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews, while the Persians who had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent evil being now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the difficulties which had perplexed Socrates.  Seven centuries of struggle, and many hundred thousand folios were the results of the remarkable fusion which followed.  Out of these elements, united in various proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the Hellenists, the Therapeute, those strange Essene communists, with the innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics.  Finally, the battle was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the best of the remainder had ranged themselves m Manicheism and Catholic Christianity:  Manicheism in which the Persian, Catholicism in which the Jewish element most preponderated.  It did not end till the close of the fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided victory which either side could claim.  The Church has yet to acknowledge how large a portion of its enemy’s doctrines it incorporated through the mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it.  Let us trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world’s oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over words and straws.