The experience of the Church showed how right was Philo's judgment when he declared that the rejection of the Torah would produce chaos. The fourth and fifth centuries exhibit an era of unparalleled disorder and confusion in the religious world,[364] sect struggling with sect, creed with creed, churches rising and falling, dogmas set up by councils and forced upon men's souls at the point of the Roman sword! And out of this struggling mass of beliefs and fancies, theologies and superstitions, sects and political forces, there arose a tyrannical, dogmatic Church which laid far heavier burthens on men's minds than ever the most ruthless Pharisee of the theologian's imagination had laid upon their body and spirit. The yoke of the law of Moses, sanctifying the life, had been broken; the fiat of popes and the decrees of synods were the saving beliefs which ensured the Kingdom of Heaven! Was it to this that the allegorizing of the law, the search for the spirit beneath the letter, the reinterpretation of the holy law of Moses in the light of philosophical reason, had brought Judaism? And was the association of Jewish religion with Greek philosophy one long error? That would be a hard conclusion, if we had to admit that Judaism cannot stand the test of contact with foreign culture. But in truth the Hellenistic interpretation of the Bible, so long as it was genuinely philosophical, remained loyal to Judaism. Only when it became hardened into dogma, fixed not only as good doctrine, but as the only saving doctrine, as the tree of life opposed to the Torah, the tree of death--only then did it become anti-Jewish, and appear as a bastard offspring of the Hebraic God-idea and Greek culture. Nor should it be forgotten that the Christian theology and the Christian conception of religion are a falling away also from the highest Hellenic ideas; for to Plato as well God was a purely spiritual unity, and religion "a system of morality based upon a law of conduct and touched with emotion." In Philo, as we have seen, the Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of God touch at their summits in their noblest expressions; the conceptions of Plato are interfused with the imagination of the prophets. The Christian theology was a descent to a commoner Hellenism--or one should rather call it a commoner syncretism--as well as to an easier, impurer Hebraism.