Neo-Pythagoreanism, as its history shows, is the philosophy of a half-religious sect with ascetic tendencies. Its transcendental philosophy was better suited to a people under an autocratic government, and ruled by Oriental traditions, than was the ethical teaching of the four Schools. The system of the ethical Schools arose out of the needs of the individual; but at this time the cry was for an absolute object which transcends both the individual and nature. The demand was for a god who could be served not by sacrifice, but by silent prayer, wisdom, and virtue. There are many points of similarity between the doctrine of Philo and neo-Pythagoreanism. The neo-Pythagoreans were monotheistic, but at the same time they accepted within their monotheism the hierarchy of the gods. They held to the commonly accepted doctrines of their time, viz., the transmigration of the soul, the dualism of the mind and body, the mediation of a graded series of celestial beings between man and God. They interpreted God in a spiritual way, but they conceived the ideas in God’s mind to be the Pythagorean numbers――just as Philo conceived them to be the Old Testament angels. =The Development Period of Hellenic Religious Philosophy= (250–476 A. D.). =The Turning to the Present for Spiritual Authority. Platonism and Neo-Platonism.= Neo-Platonism is the final statement of Hellenic culture, and the question may be asked, In what form did it present Hellenism? The answer is, It sets forth the Hellenic feeling as _mysticism_. The contribution of Plotinus was the destruction of the classic Greek ideal with its definiteness of form, and was the substitution of a new ideal of soaring spiritual exaltation. One has only to look back to the art, science, and philosophy of the Periclean Age to appreciate how far this last survival of Greek culture had drifted from its original moorings. Nevertheless, neo-Platonism is not so very far distant from that powerful ascetic principle in the Greek mysteries which is one aspect of the doctrine of Plato himself. Neo-Platonism was Platonism exaggerated on this mystic and ascetic side. Plotinus said that he was ashamed that he had a body; that the soul looks on and weeps at the sinfulness of the body; that it is not enough to regulate the body, but that the body must be exterminated. As the voice of Hellenism, neo-Platonism is speaking in an age when consciousness is weighed down with the sense of the enormity of evil and the need of salvation. Neo-Platonism feels that the moral conflict in the human soul is repeated in the universe; that the eternal struggle between matter and spirit goes on in the macrocosm as well as the microcosm. Plotinus held to the ancient Greek conception of the personification of the powers of nature, of the derivation of happiness from activity, of the supremacy of the intellect over the other faculties. But in accepting the ancient Greek doctrine of the