ssential to the formation of a church was wanting, and where
philosophical systems adopted devotional forms these were not the
creation of philosophy but were borrowed from current cults. They sought
happiness, but not through religious ritual. They did not always
formally discard or condemn existing cults, but they ignored them as
means of salvation; they sometimes recognized traditional gods and forms
of worship, but interpreted them in accordance with their own ideas.

+1103+. In India the Upanishads practically abolished the national
pantheon and the old Brahmanic ritual--knowledge, they taught, was the
key to bliss, and the knowledge was not that of the Veda, it came by
reflection; emancipation from earthly bonds, absorption into the
Infinite, was the goal of effort, but the effort was individualistic and
led to no devotional organization. Ascetic observances, as a means of
attaining perfection, were an inheritance from popular Brahmanism.[2029]
In China Taoism, originally a system of thought (based on the conception
of all-controlling order) that appealed only to a certain class of
philosophic minds, became a religion by borrowing crude ideas and
sensational methods from a debased form of Buddhism and other
sources.[2030] Confucius steadily declined to teach anything about
divine worship; Confucianism remained merely an ethical system, dealing
only with the present life, until its founder, with disregard of his
teaching, was divinized.

+1104+. Many of the Greek philosophers, from Socrates and Plato on, were
definitely (some of them warmly) religious, but their religion was
chiefly valued as an aid to ethical life, and it did not respond to the
demand for communal worship. The Platonic and Stoic conceptions of the
deity were pure, but they remained individualistic--salvation was the
creation of the man himself. The noble hymn of Cleanthes to Zeus[2031]
and the fine religious morality of Marcus Aurelius led to no church
organization. The attempted combination of Platonism and Judaism by
Philo was equally resultless. Neo-Platonism also, though it had
enthusiasm and some sense of brotherhood, showed itself unable to
produce a church. Plotinus, indeed, proposed to the Emperor Gallienus
the establishment in Campania of a city of philosophers, a Platonopolis,
in which the ideal life should be lived, but the proposal came to
nothing.[2032] The Neo-Platonic union with the deity was too vague a
conception to bring about c