tue rather than as a good in itself,
and as a helpful discipline to the man of incomplete moral strength,
though inferior to the spontaneous goodness which God vouchsafes to
the righteous. Isaac is the type of this highest bliss, while the life
of Jacob is the type of the progress to virtue through asceticism.[63]
The flight from Laban represents the abandonment of family and social
life for the practical service of God, and as Jacob, the ascetic,
became Israel, "the man who beholdeth God," so Philo determined "to
scorn delights and live laborious days" in order to be drawn nearer to
the true Being. But he seems to have been disappointed in his hopes,
and to have discovered that the attempt to cut out the natural desires
of man was not the true road to righteousness. "I often," he says,[64]
"left my kindred and friends and fatherland, and went into a solitary
place, in order that I might have knowledge of things worthy of
contemplation, but I profited nothing: for my mind was sore tempted by
desire and turned to opposite things. But now, sometimes even when I
am in a multitude of men, my mind is tranquil, and God scatters aside
all unworthy desires, teaching me that it is not differences of place
which affect the welfare of the soul, but God alone, who knows and
directs its activity howsoever he pleases."

The noble pessimism of Philo's early days was replaced by a noble
optimism in his maturity, in which he trusted implicitly in God's
grace, and believed that God vouchsafed to the good man the knowledge
of Himself without its being necessary for him to inflict
chastisements upon his body or uproot his inclinations. In this mood
moderation is represented as the way of salvation; the abandonment of
family and social life is selfish, and betrays a lack of the humanity
which the truly good man must possess.[65] Of Philo's own domestic
life we catch only a fleeting glimpse in his writings. He realized the
place of woman in the home; "her absence is its destruction," he said;
and of his wife it is told in another of the "Fragments" that when
asked one day in an assembly of women why she alone did not wear any
golden ornament, she replied, "The virtue of a husband is a sufficient
ornament for his wife."

Though in his maturity Philo renounced the ascetic life, his ideal
throughout was a mystical union with the Divine Being. To a certain
school of Judaism, which loves to make everything rational and
moderate, mysticism is al