philosophic. And one can no more doubt that before writing them he had
studied Philo, and was expanding Philo's thought in the direction which
seemed fit to him, than we can doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists.
The technical language is often identical; so are the primary ideas from
which he starts, howsoever widely the conclusions may differ. If
Plotinus considered himself an intellectual disciple of Plato, so did
Origen and Clemens. And I must, as I said before, speak of both, or of
neither. My only hope of escaping delicate ground lies in the curious
fact, that rightly or wrongly, the form in which Christianity presented
itself to the old Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly different from the
popular conception of it in modern England, that one may very likely be
able to tell what little one knows about it, almost without mentioning a
single doctrine which now influences the religious world.

But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British auditory, trained
in the school of Locke, much of ancient thought, heathen as well as
Christian, may seem so utterly the product of the imagination, so
utterly without any corresponding reality in the universe, as to look
like mere unintelligible madness. Still, I must try; only entreating my
hearers to consider, that how much soever we may honour Locke and his
great Scotch followers, we are not bound to believe them either
infallible, or altogether world-embracing; that there have been other
methods than theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground
from which both Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely
a private vagary of their own, but one which has been accepted
undoubtingly, under so many various forms, by so many different races,
as to give something of an inductive probability that it is not a mere
dream, but may be a right and true instinct of the human mind. I mean
the belief that the things which we see--nature and all her phenomena--
are temporal, and born only to die; mere shadows of some unseen