It must not be put down to the fault of the Septuagint or the allegorists or Philo that the Alexandrian development of Judaism led on to Roman Christianity. It is to be ascribed rather to the infirmity of human nature, which requires the ideas of its inspired teachers and peoples to be brought down to the common understanding, and causes the progress towards universal religion to be a slow growth. The masses of the Alexandrian Jews in his own day cannot have grasped his teaching; for Philo, to some degree, lived in a narrow world of philosophical idealism, and he did not calculate the forces which opposed and made impossible the spread of his faith in its integrity. He was aiming at what was and must for long remain unattainable--the establishment among the peoples of philosophical monotheism. No man is a prophet in his own land--or in his own time--and because Philo has in him much of the prophet, he seems to have failed. But it is the burden of our mission to sow in tears that we may reap in joy. And the work of the Alexandrian-Jewish school may be sad from one aspect of Jewish history, but it is nevertheless one of the dominating incidents of our religious annals. It did not succeed in bringing over the world to the pure idea of God, but it did help in undermining cruder paganism. It brought the nations nearer to God, and it introduced Hebraism into the thought of the Western peoples. It marked, therefore, a great step in the religious work of Israel; yet by the schools of rabbis who felt the hard hand of its offspring upon their people it was regarded as a long misfortune, to be blotted from memory. What seemed so ominous to them was that the annihilation of the nation came at the same time as the cleavage in the religion. Judaism seemed attacked no less by internal foes than by external calamity; and was likely to perish altogether or to drift into a lower conception of God, unless it could find some stalwart defence. Hence they insisted on the extension of the fence of the law, and abandoned for centuries the mission of the Jews to the outer world. This was the true Galut, or exile; not so much the political exclusion from the land of their fathers, but the enforced exclusion from the mission of the prophets. Philo is one of the brightest figures of a golden age of Jewish expansion, which passed away of a sudden, and has never since returned. In the silver and bronze ages which followed, his place in Judaism was obscured. But this age of ours, which boasts of its historical sense, looking back over the centuries and freed from the bitter dismay of the rabbis, can appraise his true worth and see in him one who realized for himself all that Judaism and Jewish culture could and still can be.