The line is not very marked which separates this philosophy from the professed revival of Plato’s teaching, which received the name of Neo-Platonism, which was the philosophy with which Christianity came most frequently into conflict or contact during the third and two following centuries (10). Fastening on the more mystical parts of Plato, to the neglect of the more practical, it probably borrowed something also from Eastern mysticism. The object of the school was to find an explanation of the problem of existence, by tracing the evolution of the absolute cause in the universe through a trinal manifestation, as being, thought, and action. The agency by which the human mind apprehended this process lay in the attainment of a kind of insight wherein the organ of knowledge is one with the object known, a state of mind and feeling whereby the mind gazes on a sphere of being which is closed to the ordinary faculties. Schelling’s theory of “intellectual intuition” is the modern parallel to this Neo-Platonic State of ἔκστασις or ἐνθουσιασμός. This philosophy, though frequently described in modern times as bearing a resemblance to Christianity in method, as being the knowledge of the one absolute Being by means of faith, is really most widely opposed in its interior spirit. It is essentially pantheism. Its monotheistic aspect, caught by contact with Semitic thought, is exterior only. Its deity, which seems personal, is really only the personification of an abstraction, a mere instance of mental realism. Man’s personality, which Christianity states clearly, was lost in the universe; religious facts in metaphysical ideas.(134) Religion accordingly would be exclusive, confined to an aristocracy of education; and the existing national cultus would be appropriated as a sensuous religion suited for the masses, a visible type of the invisible. The analogy which this philosophy bore to Christianity in aim and office, as well as the rivalry of other schools which is implied in its eclectic aspect, caused it to take up an attitude of opposition to the Christian system to which it claimed to bear affinity.