demon-belief of Persian dualism had penetrated into the imagination and feeling of the Jews, and there borne fruit. By the side of this peaceful conquest the great war-drama between Greece and Persia is enacted. Although this is not recognizedly a religious war, it is nevertheless Ormuzd and Ahriman who are repelled at Marathon, Salamis and Platæa, it is the Grecian unitarianism which is saved in these battles to develop itself, for a season undisturbed, into a radiant and beautiful culture. As has been shown already, magic, and belief upon authority, are the necessary consequences of a dualistic religion; the restriction and annihilation of free personality are equally necessary consequences of belief by authority. Can any one regarding the conflict which raged on the field of Marathon, fail to recognize the clash of two spiritual opposites, two different systems of ideas, when he sees the bands of Greeks, drawn from their agorai (places for political discussion) and gymnasiums, advance cheerfully and garlanded, but without depreciating the danger, to meet the innumerable hosts of the Orient driven on by the scourge of their leaders? On the one side, a fully developed free personality, which has its origin in a harmonious conception of nature, on the other, blind submission to external force. On the one side, liberty, on the other, despotism. One may add by the help of a logical conclusion, though this may seem more removed,—on the one side rationality, on the other magic.

Strengthened thus by victory Europe goes to seek the enemy in his own country. Alexander conquers Asia. But the new Achilles is fettered in the chains of his own slave. For while Greek culture is spreading over the surface of the conquered countries, the Oriental spirit advances beneath it in a contrary direction. The waves of the two ideal currents are partly mingled. In the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamus the literatures of the Orient and of the Occident flow together; in their halls meet the sages of the East and West; in their doctrinal systems Zoroaster and Plato, fancy and speculation, magic and rationalism are blended in the most extraordinary way. The victory of Alexander was that of the warrior, and not that of sober Aristotle’s pupil. The Judaico-Alexandrian philosophy blooms, and gnosticism,—that monstrous bastard of specifically different cosmical systems, is already begotten, when Christianity springs up in Palestine, and unites itself with the Jewish dualism derived from Zoroaster, and thus proceeds to conquer the world by the weapons of belief.

In the mean time Rome has extended and established its empire. The nationalities included in it have been mingled together; their various gods have been carried into the same Pantheon; and their ideas have been brought face to face. The universal empire, to maintain its existence, has been forced to centralize itself into a despotism of the Oriental type, the free forms of state have perished, philosophical skepticism and eudemonism have abolished among the cultured classes the inherited notions of religion. All this, with its accompaniments of moral depravity and material necessity, have prepared the soil of the Occident for receiving the seed of the new religion. Emptiness and misery make the difference between ideality and reality, between good and evil, all the more perceptible even to unitarian nations. Dualism thus prepared for in the realms of thought and feeling, spreads in Christian form with irresistible force over the Roman provinces. Innumerable masses of the poor and oppressed devote themselves to the “philosophy of the Barbarians and the Orient” (as a Greek thinker called Christianity) because they recognize in it their own experience of life, and have full assurance in their hope of relief.

The Hellenico-Roman paganism offers a fruitless resistance. The persecutions on the part of the state only hasten the spread of Christianity. What the state can not do, perhaps the Hellenic culture and philosophy may do. These, once mutually hostile, are reconciled in the face of common danger. The dying lamp of antiquity flares and brightens when pure hearts and profound minds, otherwise despising the myths as superstition, now grasp them as symbols of higher truths. Philosophy goes forth, in the form of Neoplatonism.

But Neoplatonism has itself apostatized from the rational and unitarian. Plotinus and Ammonius Saccas try in vain to restore it. It only unwittingly helps its adversary, especially when, to gain the masses, it consents to compete with him in miracles. Jamblichus and others practice secret arts in order to outrival the Christian magi, and they glorify Pythagoras and Appollonius of Tyana as fit to rank with Jesus of Nazareth in miraculous gifts. By this they only contribute to the spread of magic and the principles of dualism. The current of Oriental notions proceeds all the more rapidly on its course of triumph.

Christian dualism already feels itself strong enough to battle not only against its declared enemies, but also those Occidental elements of culture which in its beginnings it had received into its bosom and which had procured its entrance among the more intelligent classes. It feels instinctively that even the school of thought which has sprung up within the Church is far too unitarian and rationalistic to be tolerated in the long run. Such men as Clemens of Alexandria and Origen, who are struck by what is external and imperishable in Christianity, and know how to separate this from its dualistic form, fight a tragical battle for the union of belief and thought. Admitting that Christ is all in all, the immediate power and wisdom of God, they nevertheless wish to save the Hellenic philosophy from the destruction which a fanaticism, revelling in the certainty and all-sufficiency of revelation, directs against every expression of an occidental culture, whether in national life, or art, or science. They point out that philosophy, if it can do nothing else that is good, can furnish rational weapons against those who assail faith, and that it can and ought to be the “real wall of defence about the vineyard.” Their argument is without effect. Philosophy is of the devil: yea, everything true and good in life and doctrine which heathendom has possessed, is declared by one of the fathers to be the imposture of Satan (ingenia diaboli quædam de divinis affectandis); and faith is so far independent of thought that it is better to say “I believe because it is improbable, absurd, impossible.”[10] In vain the dying Clemens exclaims: “Even if philosophy were of the devil, Satan could deceive men only in the garb of an angel of light: he must allure men by the appearance of truth, by the intermixture of truth and falsehood; we ought therefore to seek and recognize the truth from whatever source it come.... And even this gift to the pagans can have been theirs only by the will of God, and must consequently be included in the divine plan of educating humanity.... If sin and disorder are attributable to the devil, how absurd to make him the author and giver of so good a thing as philosophy!... God gave the Law to the Jews, and philosophy to the Gentiles, only to prepare for the coming of Christ.” Such are the words that ring out the last dying echo of Hellenic culture and humanity! It is not a mere accident that with philosophy Clemens and Origen also sought to save the unitarian