THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 331 



become inextricably mixed and confounded with the true Scrip- 

 tures. 



Philo, " the Jew," a native of Alexandrea, known to have 

 been in active public life at the date of the crucifixion, was a 

 voluminous writer on all the scriptures and religions of his da} 7 . 

 He was sent as an emissary to the Emperor Caligula at Rome on 

 behalf of the Hellenistic Jews at Alexandrea about seven years 

 after the death of Christ, yet very strangely he appears to have 

 been wholly ignorant of the great event that gave rise to the 

 Christian era. Philo has left a number of works on Neo-Plato- 

 nism and the Jewish Scriptures. He also wrote one on the great 

 religious school of his day, known as the Essenic or Ascetic 

 philosophy. This last book has not come down to us entire, but 

 is fully reported by Eusebius (A. D. 324), the great historian arid 

 authority of the first three centuries of Christianity. 



The society of the Essenes to which Philo belonged, and which 

 was already an old and flourishing association throughout Egypt 

 in the time of Christ, was known under all the following names : 

 Essenes or Therapeuts, signifying healers or doctors; Ascetics, 

 from their austere discipline and self -mortifications ; Monks, from 

 their retirement from the world ; Ecclesiastics, from their being 

 called out, elected, set apart ; and Eclectics, from their selecting 

 from all systems. The following is the description of them as 

 given by Eusebius on the authority of Philo, and condensed 

 from " Ecclesiastical History," Book 2nd, ch. 16 : They had in 

 every parisli their churches and monasteries in which monks per- 

 formed the mysteries of the sublime life, also their bishops, 

 priests and deacons ; they renounced all property and divided up 

 every thing equally among themselves ; they observed the self 

 same fastings and grand festivals that the Christians afterwards 

 observed ; pretended to have had apostolic founders who had 

 handed down to them holy scriptures ; practiced the very manners 

 that distinguished the apostles of Christ, " abjuring the pleasures 

 of the body," " nor would they eat anything that had blood in it ;" 

 they used scriptures which they believed to be divinely inspired, 

 and which Eusebius himself believed to be none other than the 

 substance of our Gospels ; had the same allegorical method of 



