For the stream of Platonic thought was now to join itself with other influences coming, for the most part, from farther East. One of the few Egyptian words which have come down into our language is _ammonia_. It is the name of an alkali which was said to have been found near a certain spot in the Libyan desert, where there was an Egyptian temple to Zeus Ammon, and it will serve to remind us that Alexander the Great was deeply under the influence of the Egyptian priesthood when, in 332 B.C., after his brilliant career of conquests, he visited this temple to pay his devotions before founding the city of Alexandria. We find, therefore—as might be expected—a strong Egyptian element blending with what was Greek in the thoughts and feelings that began to ferment in the more enterprising Alexandrian bosoms. And that is not all. A third influence was added. In the third century B.C. a certain capable ruler of Alexandria invited a body of Egyptian Jews to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The Septuagint, as it was called, was so successful that Greek soon became the official language of the Hebrew religion. Thus, the Greek version found its way into the synagogues of Palestine, and it must have been the Greek version which was read by Jesus of Nazareth. Without making a study of the Septuagint, it is easy to perceive how passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold and clear-cut Greek words, until classical Greek had grown slowly into the “Hellenistic” Greek of the New Testament. Seeking for words to convey such notions as ‘sin’, ‘righteousness’, ‘defilement’, ‘abomination’, ‘ungodly’, the Jewish translators had to do the best they could with vocables which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied something more like ‘folly’, ‘integrity’, ‘dirt’, ‘objectionable practice’, ‘ignorant’. Any number of such examples could be found. The harmless Greek word ‘eidōlon’ (_idol_), which had formerly meant any sort of mental image, including a mere mental fancy, suddenly found itself selected from its fellows to be spit upon and cast into outer darkness. ‘Paradeisos’, on the other hand—the park of a Persian nobleman—was spirited away, as though by the four Djinns of Arabian legend, first to the Garden of Eden and then to the heavens. It may well be that in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, more than anywhere else, is crystallized out for us that process which went on in and about Alexandria for three or four hundred years, and which remained almost unaffected by the inclusion of the city within the Roman Empire. Language never ceases growing, but an important document such as this is like a cross-section of its stem. In it we can see clearly what an enormous part that Alexandrian mingling of Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek conceptions of the Almighty has played in determining the subtler part of the words we use every day—in building up those delicate associations of which few of us ever