destroyer of the hated heathen, who was to establish them as the tyrant
race of the whole earth. On that fearful day on which, for a moment,
they cast away even that last dream, and cried, "We have no king but
Caesar," they spoke the secret of their hearts. It was a Caesar, a
Jewish Caesar, for whom they had been longing for centuries. And if
they could not have such a deliverer, they would have none: they would
take up with the best embodiment of brute Titanic power which they could
find, and crucify the embodiment of Righteousness and Love. Amid all
the metaphysical schools of Alexandria, I know none so deeply
instructive as that school of the Rabbis, "the glory of Israel."

But you will say: "This does not look like a school likely to
regenerate Alexandrian thought." True: and yet it did regenerate it,
both for good and for evil; for these men had among them and preserved
faithfully enough for all practical purposes, the old literature of
their race; a literature which I firmly believe, if I am to trust the
experience of 1900 years, is destined to explain all other literatures;
because it has firm hold of the one eternal root-idea which gives life,
meaning, Divine sanction, to every germ or fragment of human truth which
is in any of them. It did so, at least, in Alexandria for the Greek
literature. About the Christian era, a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, a
disciple of Plato and of Aristotle, did seem to himself to find in the
sacred books of his nation that which agreed with the deepest
discoveries of Greek philosophy; which explained and corroborated them.
And his announcement of this fact, weak and defective as it was, had the
most enormous and unexpected results. The father of New Platonism was
Philo the Jew.