The name of Philo the Jew is now all but forgotten among us. He was
laughed out of sight during the last century, as a dreamer and an
allegorist, who tried eclectically to patch together Plato and Moses.
The present age, however, is rapidly beginning to suspect that all who
thought before the eighteenth century were not altogether either fools
or impostors; old wisdom is obtaining a fairer hearing day by day, and
is found not to be so contradictory to new wisdom as was supposed. We
are beginning, too, to be more inclined to justify Providence, by
believing that lies are by their very nature impotent and doomed to die;
that everything which has had any great or permanent influence on the
human mind, must have in it some germ of eternal truth; and setting
ourselves to separate that germ of truth from the mistakes which may
have distorted and overlaid it. Let us believe, or at least hope, the
same for a few minutes, of Philo, and try to find out what was the
secret of his power, what the secret of his weakness.
First: I cannot think that he had to treat his own sacred books
unfairly, to make them agree with the root-idea of Socrates and Plato.
Socrates and Plato acknowledged a Divine teacher of the human spirit;
that was the ground of their philosophy.
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