His three great works are: _A Hortatory Discourse Addressed to the Greeks_ (Λόγος Προτρεπτικὸς πρὸς Ἓλληνας), _The Instructor_ (_Paidagogos_--strictly, _Tutor_, or Conductor to school), and the _Miscellanies_ (_Stromateis_, or _Stromata_--lit. “Patch-work”).[65] The three works were intended to form a graduated and complete initiation and instruction in Christian theology and ethics. The first is addressed to the pagan Greek world, the second to the recent convert, and in the last he conducts the initiated to the higher _gnosis_, or knowledge. The _Miscellanies_ originally consisted of eight books, the last of which is lost. The whole series is of unusual value, not only as the record of the opinions of the ablest and most philosophical of the mediators between Greek philosophy and the Christian creed, but also as containing an immense amount of information on Greek life and literature. Eloquence, earnestness, and erudition equally characterise the writings of Clement. He assumes the name and character of a _Gnostic_,[66] or philosophic Christian, not in the historical but in his own sense of the word, and professes himself an eclectic--as far as a liberal interpretation of his religion admitted. “By philosophy,” he says, “I do not mean the Stoic, the Platonic, the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian, but all that has been well said in each of those sects teaching righteousness with religious science--all this selected truth (τοῦτο σύμπαν τὸ ἐκλεκτικὸν) I call philosophy.” Again, he echoes the sentiments of Seneca in lamenting that “we incline more to beliefs that are in repute (τὰ ἔνδοξα), even when they are contradictory, than to the truth” (_Miscellanies_, i. and vii.). “It would have been well for Christianity if the principles, which he set forth with such an array of profound scholarship and ingenious reasoning, had been adopted more generally by those who came after him.... If anyone, even in a Protestant community, were to assert the liberal and comprehensive principles of the great Father of Alexandria, he would be told that he wished to compromise the distinctive claims of theology, and that he was little better than a heathen and a publican.”[67] It is in his second treatise, the _Instructor_ or _Tutor_, that Clement displays his opinions on the subject of flesh-eating:--