The first procession, from the first One, or intelligible Cause, is the intelligible Triad, consisting of Being, Life, and Intellect, which are the three highest things after the first God. Plato, in his _Parmenides_, calls the Author of the Universe Intellect and Father, and represents him commanding the junior gods to imitate the power which he employed in their generation. It follows, that that which generated from the Father is offspring, Son or Logos, second in the Triad. The third power or principle in the Triad is Intellect, or Spirit of the Universe. Here we have the Father, the Logos, and the Soul of the Universe in a mysterious union; and as they all proceed from the One, are one in unity. The author of "Decline and Fall" thus defines the theology of Plato: "The vain hope of extricating himself from these difficulties which must forever oppress the feeble powers of the human mind, might induce Plato to consider the divine nature under the threefold modification of the First Cause, the Reason or Logos and the Soul or Spirit of the Universe. His poetical imagination sometimes fixed and animated these metaphysical abstractions; the three archial or original principles were represented in the Platonic system as three gods, united with each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation; and the Logos was particularly considered, under the more accessible character of the Son of an Eternal Father, and the Creator and Governor of the world." (Vol. I., page 438.) Such is an outline of the theology of Plato, as we learn it from the "Explanatory translation" of Taylor to the _Cratylus_ and other works of the great light of Greece. The ideas of Plato, under the teachings of the Alexandrian school, underwent changes and modifications, but were the source of all subsequent systems of theology, and we can readily detect in each the genius of the Athenian. Through the invitation of the Ptolemies, large numbers of Jews settled in the new capital of Egypt, who carried with them the laws and institutions of Moses. It was not many years before the religious ideas of the descendants of the colonists were tinctured and in some degree moulded after the doctrines taught at the school of Alexandria. Under the lead of Philo a new school arose, which was formed from a union of "Mosaic faith and Grecian philosophy," in which the distinctive features of each are clearly preserved.