There remains but one difficulty to be solved, and that is why he should suggest the changing of the numbering of the days of the week by striking one from the count of each day, thus making the Sabbath the sixth day in the count instead of the seventh; and making Sunday the seventh day in the count instead of the eighth. The answer seems to have eluded the observation of the first-day and anti-Sabbatarian writers who have sought to grasp it. But there is a fact which solves the difficulty. Clement’s commentary on the fourth commandment, from which these quotations are taken, is principally made up of curious observations on “the perfect number six,” “the number seven motherless and childless,” and the number eight, which is “a cube,” and the like matters, and is taken with some change of arrangement almost word for word from Philo Judæus, a teacher who flourished at Alexandria about one century before Clement. Whoever will take pains to compare these two writers will find in Philo nearly all the ideas and illustrations which Clement has used, and the very language also in which he has expressed them.[691] Philo was a mystical teacher to whom Clement looked up as to a master. A statement which we find in Philo, in immediate connection with several curious ideas, which Clement quotes from him, gives, beyond all doubt, the key to Clement’s suggestion that possibly the eighth day should be called the seventh, and the seventh day called the sixth. Philo said that, according to God’s purpose, the first day of time was not to be numbered with the other days of the creation week. Thus he says:— “And he allotted each of the six days to one of the portions of the whole, TAKING OUT THE FIRST DAY, which he does not even call the first day, _that it may not be numbered with the others_, but entitling it ONE, he names it rightly, perceiving in it, and ascribing to it, the nature and appellation of the limit.”[692]