Only in the African province did Macedonian rule secure a religious basis. What an Alexander could hardly have achieved in Asia, a Ptolemy did easily in Egypt. There the _de facto_ ruler, of whatever race, had been installed a god since time out of mind, and an omnipotent priesthood, dominating a docile people, stood about the throne. The Assyrian conquerors had stiffened their backs in Egypt to save affronting the gods of their fatherland; but the Ptolemies, like the Persians, made no such mistake, and had three centuries of secure rule for their reward. The knowledge that what the East demanded could be provided easily and safely even by Macedonians in the Nile valley alone was doubtless present to the sagacious mind of Ptolemy when, letting all wider lands pass to others, he selected Egypt in the first partition of the provinces. The Greek, in a word, had only his philosophies to offer to the religiosity of the East. But a philosophy of religion is a complement to, a modifying influence on, religion, not a substitute sufficient to satisfy the instinctive and profound craving of mankind for God. While this craving always possessed the Asiatic mind, the Greek himself, never naturally insensible to it, became more and more conscious of his own void as he lived in Asia. What had long stood to him for religion, namely passionate devotion to the community, was finding less and less to feed on under the restricted political freedom which was now his lot everywhere. Superior though he felt his culture to be in most respects, it lacked one thing needful, which inferior cultures around him possessed in full. As time went on he became curious, then receptive, of the religious systems among whose adherents he found himself, being coerced insensibly by nature's abhorrence of a vacuum. Not that he swallowed any Eastern religion whole, or failed, while assimilating what he took, to transform it with his own essence. Nor again should it be thought that he gave nothing at all in return. He gave a philosophy which, acting almost as powerfully on the higher intelligences of the East as their religions acted on his intelligence, created the "Hellenistic" type, properly so called, that is the oriental who combined the religious instinct of Asia with the philosophic spirit of Greece--such an oriental as (to take two very great names), the Stoic apostle Zeno, a Phoenician of Cyprus, or the Christian apostle, Saul the Jew of Tarsus. By the creation of this type, East and West were brought at last very near together, divided only by the distinction of religious philosophy in Athens from philosophic religion in Syria.