Outside Palestine the most important centre of Jewish thought was Alexandria. There from the time of the captivity a large colony of Jews had been established. This colony became in many respects almost independent of Jerusalem in religion; it formed and translated its own canon of sacred writings, and even set up a temple of its own. Speaking the Greek language and living in the most cosmopolitan city of the world, the meeting-ground of eastern and western thought, the Jews of Alexandria were naturally affected by the speculative activity of Greek philosophy. The high development of Judaism encouraged speculation in its adherents. The Jewish philosopher had not, like the Pagan, to cast his religion aside when he began to seek out the causes of things; on the contrary, his religion seemed to cover a great part of the philosophical path. Under these circumstances, it is not strange that a philosophy should have arisen among the Alexandrian Jews. For us this philosophy is represented by Philo, who was born about twenty years before Christ. A Jew by birth, and nominally always one in religion, Philo was so steeped in Pagan thought that he really ranks as a Greek philosopher. The chief object of his life was to reconcile Judaism and Hellenism, to give a philosophical reason for every feature of the Jewish religion. In fulfilment of this purpose, he handled Judaism with considerable freedom, and bent its simple theology into a mystical Platonism. The tendency which inevitably characterized philosophy to push God back from contact with creation, and to preserve his shadowy glory as an absolute being, of course influenced Philo, who simply as a philosopher was bound to be a pure theist. But as a Jew also, Philo was bound to be a pure theist, with the most reverent conception of God. Thus two forces acted on him, as a Jew and as a Greek philosopher, driving him to the most refined theism, and this double pressure produced what Professor Huxley calls Philo’s agnosticism. He was compelled to form a conception of God utterly inconsistent with his character as creator of the world. Philo could not imagine that God had any relations with matter, or that he contemplated anything except the world of his own ideas. So philosophy, helped by his monotheistic religion, forced Philo to pursue the path of theological development which I have described above, to leave God in his pure essence absolute and unknown, and to attribute all the phenomena of creation to a mediator between this pure essence and created things.