As soon as Greek was reintroduced into the scholarly world, Philo began to reassert an important influence on theology. One remarkable school of English mystics and religious philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists, who wrote during the seventeenth century, founded upon him their method and also their general attitude to philosophy.[344] They were Christian neo-Platonists, who looked for spiritual allegories in the Old and New Testaments, and combined the teachings of Jesus with the emotional idealism of the Alexandrian interpreters of Plato. They affirmed enthusiastically God's revelation to the universe and to individual man through the Logos. Their imitation of Philo's allegorism serves to mark the important place that he occupied in the learned world during the seventeenth century; and supports, however slightly, the suggestion that he influenced, directly or indirectly, the supreme Jewish philosopher of the age, Baruch de Spinoza. That he was well known in Holland at the time is shown in divers ways. He is quoted by the famous jurist Grotius in his book which founded the science of international law; he is quoted and criticised, as we have seen, by Scaliger; and curiously enough, his name, "Philo-Judæus," is applied by Rembrandt to the portrait of his own father, now in the Ferdinandeum at Innsbruck. It is tempting to conjecture that there was a direct connection between the Jewish philosophers of the ancient and the modern world. Whether it existed or not, there is certainly kinship in their ideas. Spinoza does actually refer in one place, in his "Theologico-Political Tractate" (ch. x), to the opinion of Philo-Judæus upon the date of Psalm lxxxviii, and there are other places in the same book, where he almost echoes the words of the Jewish Platonist; as where he speaks of God's eternal Word being divinely inscribed in the human mind: "And this is the true original of God's covenant, stamped with His own seal, namely, the idea of Himself, as it were, with the image of His Godhead" (iv); or, again, "The supreme reward for keeping God's Word is that Word itself." Spinoza knew no Greek, but, master as he was of Christian theology, he may have studied Philo in a Latin translation, and caught some of his phrases. With or without influence, he developed, as Philo had done, a system of philosophy, starting from the Hebrew conception of God and blending Jewish tradition with scientific metaphysics. The Unity of God and His sole reality were the fundamental principles of his thought, as they had been of Philo's. He rejected, indeed, with scorn the notion that all philosophy must be deduced from the Bible, which was to him a book of moral and religious worth, but free from all philosophical doctrine. Theology, the subject of the Bible, according to him, demands perfect obedience, philosophy perfect knowledge.[345] Both alike are saving, but the spheres of the two are distinct: and