Porphyry, the pious disciple of Plotinus, was himself a philosopher of note, and the Neo-Platonic School continued to flourish all through the 4th cent. Its main temper kept the same; it was pessimistic as regards the actual world and actual men, but optimistic as regards the future because it believed that the world and all in it has emanated from God and has been granted the means of reverting to him. It recognised the presence of Evil but not its eternal existence, and consequently it was a practical support to its believers, and upheld the last of them, Hypatia, through martyrdom. When I do contemplate your words and you revered Hypatia, then I kneel to view the Virgin’s starry home; there in the skies your works and perfect words I recognise, a star unsullied of instruction wise.[5] Footnote 5: Translated by R. A. Furness. Thus wrote an unknown admirer at the beginning of the 5th Century. None of Hypatia’s discourses have been preserved, but we know that with her and with her father, Theon, the great tradition of Plotinus expired at Alexandria. III. CHRISTIANITY. INTRODUCTION. Percolating through the Jewish Communities, the Christian religion reached Egypt as early as the 1st cent. A.D. On its arrival, it found, already established there, two distinct forms of spiritual life. * * * * * The first was the spiritual life of Ancient Egypt, which had clung to the soil of the Nile valley for over 4,000 years. It had existed so long that though Christianity could close its temples she never quite uprooted it from the heart of the people. The resurrection of Osiris as Sun God; the partaking of him as Corn God by the blessed in the world below; the beneficent group of the mother Isis with Horus her child; the same Horus as a young warrior slaying the snaky Set; the key-shaped “ankh” that the gods and goddesses carried as a sign of their immortality:—these symbols had sunk too deeply into the minds of the native Egyptians to be removed by episcopal decrees. Consequently there were cases of reversion—e.g. at Menouthis (near Aboukir) in 480, when some villagers were discovered worshipping the ancient deities in a private house. And there were also cases of confusion, where the old religion passed imperceptibly into the new. Did Christianity borrow from the Osiris cult her doctrines of the Resurrection and Personal Immortality, and her sacrament of the Eucharist? The suggestion has been made. It is more certain that she borrowed much of her symbolism and popular art. Isis and Horus become the Virgin and Child, Horus and Set St. George and the Dragon, while the “ankh” appears unaltered on some of the Christian tomb stones as a looped cross, and slightly altered on others as a cross with a handle.