that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived
of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and
has to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and
wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men,
involves a free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert?
And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daemonic Element, an
universal Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man,
that one Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also? At
least, so strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this
direction, that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which
yawned between man and the invisible things after which he yearned, by
reviving the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a Daemonology
borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and partly from the Jewish rabbis,
which formed a descending chain of persons, downward from the highest
Deities to heroes, and to the guardian angel of each man; the meed of
the philosopher being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could
rise above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly daemon, and
become the pupil of a God, and finally a God himself.

These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in
our eyes, as a moral being. All accounts of him seem to prove him to
have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been,
"good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his
conversation." He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a
faithful steward of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and
orphans, a righteous and loving man. In his practical life, the ascetic
and gnostic element comes out strongly enough. The body, with him, was
not evil, neither was it good; it was simply nothing--why care about it?
He would have no portrait taken of his person: "It was humiliating
enough to be obliged to carry a shadow about with him, without having a