[Sidenote: Its Religious Inspiration.]

[Sidenote: Suggestive of Pantheism, but not such in Spinoza's Sense.]

But the inspiration of the time-spirit was not confined to the Christian
Church. For the city of Alexandria, where that spirit seems to have been
peculiarly potent as shown in the transfigured Judaism of Philo, was the
birthplace of the Neo-Platonic school already mentioned above. And among
its greatest members, such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, the religious
influence of the East was distinctly apparent. True, they followed
Socrates and Plato in reverence for knowledge as the unfailing begetter
of virtue. But their speculations about the divine Being were touched by
Oriental emotion. And we may with some confidence believe that their
development of the Platonic Trinity owed a good deal to the rapid spread
of Christianity. Thus the sentiment, the fervour, the yearning for
"salvation," the worship and devotion taught by the best of the
Neo-Platonists were not so much, from Athens as from Sinai and Galilee.
Yet, though there were in their world-conception many anticipations of
the gospel of the "God-intoxicated man," whom the counsels of the
Eternal reserved for the fulness of times, it would scarcely be accurate
to describe the system of any of them as strictly Pantheistic. For they
were always troubled about "matter" as an anomalous thing in a divine
universe, and in treating of it they hesitated between the notion of an
eternal nuisance which the Demiurgus, or acting God, could only modify,
not destroy, and, on the other hand, a strained theory of an evil
nothing, which is yet something. Again, so far from realising Spinoza's
faith in God as so literally All in All that there is nothing else but
He, they would not tolerate the contact of the Infinite with the finite,
of God with the world. Consistently with such prepossessions, they held