306 THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY vm 



was too thorough an Israelite and too much the 

 child of his time to be content with this agnostic 

 position. With the help of the Platonic and 

 Stoic philosophy, he constructed an apprehensible, 

 if not comprehensible, quasi-deity out of the 

 Logos ; while other more or less personified divine 

 powers, or attributes, bridged over the interval 

 between God and man; between the sacred 

 existence, too pure to be called by any name which 

 implied a conceivable quality, and the gross and 

 evil world of matter. In order to get over the 

 ethical difficulties presented by the naive natural- 

 ism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the 

 divine authority of which he firmly believed, 

 Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in 

 like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that 

 great Excalibur which they had forged with 

 infinite pains and skill the method of allegorical 

 interpretation. This mighty " two-handed engine 

 at the door " of the theologian is 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 



