honestly believed to be the oracles of divine wisdom, they were simply obscurely symbolising the more spiritual systems of heathen philosophy, reserved for the enlightenment of future generations; and thus had called down the vengeance of Jehovah on the unhappy children of Israel, for neglecting a theological system unintelligible to all, until explained by Plato and his disciples.

About four centuries before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, Plato, an illustrious Athenian, having applied the highest faculties of human genius to sublime speculation on the attributes of Divinity, conceived that the Supreme Being is of Trinitarian essence, namely, the selfexistent First Cause, the Logos or Reason emanating from the First Cause, and the Spirit of the universe-a scheme of Oriental mysticism which was doubtless suggested to Plato during his Eastern travels throughout regions where divine Emanations and Avatars have been the imaginative creations of Indian theosophists from time immemorial.

If a mere heathen philosopher could fuse so sublime a system with the mythology of Greece, what marvels might not the Oriental imagination of Hebrew sages accomplish through the spiritual interpretation of Mosaic materialism! Alexandrine Jews accordingly Hellenised Hebrew annals, rendered the precepts of Leviticus into verse, dramatised Exodus in the name of Ezekiel, and sustained the immortality of the soul through the Wisdom of Solomon, published as the autogram of a monarch who nearly eight centuries previously had declared, 'There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, for that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth

them; as one dieth so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath: so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a beast for all is vanity.'1

The zealous author of this philosophic movement had successfully anticipated evangelical apologists, in showing that Hebrew oracles mean something very different from what they seem to utter, when Philo Judæus, one of the most gifted sons of Israel, appeared upon the scene (B.c. 20-A.D. 50), attained pre-eminence among the Alexandrine sages of Judah, and outPlatoed Plato through the startling discovery, in the pages of the divinely translated Septuagint, that the Logos of philosophy, the #pwróyovos, or first-born of God, was the Jehovah of Moses and the prophets !

The philosophic mysticism of the Alexandrine school, thus sanctioned by the greatest of the Hebrew disciples of Plato, necessarily exercised an important influence on the Judaism of Palestine; and Paul, educated in the Rabbinic school of Jerusalem, owes more to the Platonism of Philo of Alexandria, than to the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth.

We speak of Alexandria as the cosmopolitan centre of Platonic Judaism; but facility of intercourse throughout the Roman Empire brought numerous other colonies of Hellenistic Jews in contact with theosophic mysticism. When, therefore, Paul went forth to evangelise numerous cities inhabited by both Jews and Gentiles, he did not merely meet with ritualistic votaries of Judaism, and pious worshippers of Olympian gods, but earnest thinkers, moved by the spirit of their age to turn from ancient shrines to modern ideals of Divinity, Ecclesiastes ii. 24, iii. 19.

and prepared to embrace with enthusiasm any theological system harmonising with their spiritual dreams.

Philo had declared that the Septuagint had been the work 'not of mere translators, but of men divinely chosen and appointed, to whom it was given to understand and clearly express the full sense and meaning of Moses.' This alien version of Hebrew Scripture, allegorically interpreted in Alexandrian schools, therefore became the corrupted source of inspiration to the compilers of gospels and the authors of epistles, who relied more on imaginative interpretation of ancient Scripture than on the actual facts of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the unknown author's exaggerated symbolism at once discloses the presence of a pupil of Philo, rather than of a disciple of Jesus.

The Jews and Gentiles evangelised by Paul, doubtless followed the example of the Bereans in studying the Scriptures daily through the Alexandrine version but instead of being instructed in its spiritual meaning through the revelations said to have been personally made by Jesus to the Galilean apostles after his resurrection, the source of interpretation is found in the school of Philo. Now, a certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrine by race, a learned man, came to Ephesus; and he was mighty in the Scriptures. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and being fervent in spirit, he spake and taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism. of John.'1 But being further instructed in a more advanced Christianity by Priscilla and Aquila, mere

1 Acts xviii. 24, 25.

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novices who had recently arrived from Pontus and been evangelised by Paul, Apollos started on an independent mission to Achaia, where he helped them much which had believed through grace; for he powerfully confuted the Jews, showing publicly by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.'

Thus, at the dawn of Christianity, an Alexandrine sophist goes forth to preach the Gospel, not of Jesus of Nazareth, but of a constructive Christ, evolved from the pages of an alien version of Moses and the prophets interpreted in the light of Alexandrine mysticism. Alas for the visionary dreams of Galilee! The voice which asked for nothing more than simple faith in the Son of Man is silent, and forthwith polemical evangelists undertake to prove the Gospel from the pages of a book which Jesus never read; and clamorous controversialists appear before proconsular judgment-seats, to meet the contemptuous scorn of a Gallio, whose practical sagacity excludes theology from the scope of Roman judicature.

Gentile converts being thus referred to the Septuagint, in confirmation of a Gospel which depicts the Deity as the beneficent Father of all mankind, heard with incredulous amazement, of the Hebrew Jehovah, whose patriarchal and royal favourites outraged the noblest precepts of heathen virtue; and piously massacred defenceless women and children in honour of a Divinity who thus shared the thirst for sacrificial blood with the most sanguinary deities of remote mythology. If the votaries of Olympian gods could be inspired with the wisdom and virtue of a Socrates or a Plato, why not attribute to the objects of their worship supremacy

in divinity over a God whose personal government could evolve no wisdom higher than the cynical pessimism of a Solomon, no virtue nobler than the mercenary piety of a David? Or if these ancient deities were to be degraded to the rank of Dæmons, assigned to them by Paul, why not also dethrone the Hebrew Jehovah in favour of the risen Jesus, deified as the Divine Reason (Oêtos λóyos), the Second God (ó Sévtepos Ocós) of Platonic theosophy?

On the other hand, Hebrew converts, won to Christianity during the first outburst of enthusiasm which announced the presence of the Paraclete, suffered all the chilling influence of reaction, when more calmly criticising the startling paradox that he, who had been condemned to the appalling ignominy of the cross by those who occupied the seat of Moses, was the promised Messiah of the Prophets.

How, therefore, were these perplexing problems, as yet but floating in the atmosphere of Palestine and Greece, to find solution in the Catholic Christianity of the future? Hebrew monotheists, unconscious, through national egotism, of the irreconcilable attributes of the Mosaic Jehovah and the Supreme Ruler of the universe, had inflexibly sustained, from the period of contact with Persian theology, the absolute unity of the Godhead. How, therefore, was the power, wisdom, and justice of the ideal First Cause of heathen philosophy to be vindicated without compromising the character, or even endangering the position of Jehovah; and if the Hebrew God were assigned a secondary place as the Logos of Philo, how was Jesus of Nazareth to satisfy Gentile aspirations by sharing the honours of Divinity,