warranted to make a speedy end of any
and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken
allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, "poetically" or, "in a
spiritual sense," the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter
desires they should mean. In Biblical phrase, Zeno (who probably had
a strain of Semitic blood in him) was the "father of all such as
reconcile." No doubt Philo and his followers were eminently religious
men; but they did endless injury to the cause of religion by laying the
foundations of a new theology, while equipping the defenders of it
with the subtlest of all weapons of offence and defence, and with an
inexhaustible store of sophistical arguments of the most plausible
aspect.

The question of the real bearing upon theology of the influence exerted
by the teaching of Philo's contemporary, Jesus of Nazareth, is one upon
which it is not germane to my present purpose to enter. I take it simply
as an unquestionable fact that his immediate disciples, known to their
countrymen as "Nazarenes," were regarded as, and considered themselves
to be, perfectly orthodox Jews, belonging to the puritanic or pharisaic
section of their people, and differing from the rest only in their
belief that the Messiah had already come. Christianity, it is said,
first became clearly differentiated at Antioch, and it separated
itself from orthodox Judaism by denying the obligation of the rite
of circumcision and of the food prohibitions, prescribed by the law.
Henceforward theology became relatively stationary among the Jews, [34]
and the history of its rapid progress in a new course of evolution is
the history of the Christian Churches, orthodox and heterodox. The
steps in this evolution are obvious. The first is the birth of a new
theological scheme arising out of the union of elements derived from
Greek philosophy with elements derived from Israelitic theology. In
the fourth Gospel, the Logos, raised to a somewhat higher degree of
personification than in the Alexandrian theosophy, is identified with
Jesus of Nazareth. In the Epistles, especially the later of those
attributed to Paul, the Israelitic ideas of the Messiah and of
sacrificial atonement coalesce with one another and with the embodiment
of the Logos in Jesus, until the apotheosis of the Son of man is almost,
or quite, effected. The history of Christian dogma, from Justin to
Athanasius, is a record of continual progress in the same direction,
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