The modifications which these influences wrought in that body of Hellenic wisdom which had been the material of Plutarch’s work were most conspicuous in the Theology and Dæmonology of the Neo-Platonists. Plutarch had been content to state the Unity, Eternity, Absoluteness of God. He needed such a conception to make the world intelligible; but he defined his conception with a rare simplicity which satisfies the practical mind as well as meets the essential requirements of Philosophy. But the Neo-Platonist theology refines and subdivides and abstracts to an extent which puzzles and bewilders its most earnest students, and removes God infinitely further from mankind than even the Ideas of Plato are removed. “According to Plotinus, God is Goodness without Love. Man may love God, but God cannot love man.” Even the “Divine Soul,” the third Hypostasis of the Neo-Platonist Trinity, that which lies nearest the comprehension of the common intellect, “is of little intellectual or religious significance in the mind of Plotinus.” Dogmatism would be unbecoming on a subject where Kirchner and Zeller are at variance, and where the French lucidity of Vacherot and Saisset casts little more light than the close and careful analysis of Dr. Bigg.[388] But it is necessary to a full understanding of Plutarch’s position to consider his relation to his successors as well as to his predecessors, and we are therefore compelled to a brief analysis of the Neo-Platonic Theology and Dæmonology, putting ourselves under more competent guidance than we can ourselves hope to supply. “The Supreme Cause,” says Dr. Bigg, “God, in the proper sense of the word, ... embraces in Himself a unity of Three Hypostases.... Hypostasis signifies the underlying cause of the phenomenal manifestation. Hence it can be applied to all three Persons of the Platonic Trinity, while Being could only be used of the second and third.—Each Hypostasis is a person, but a purely intellectual person. All three are one, like three mutually enfolding thoughts, and where one is there is the All in the fullness of its power. All are eternal, but the second is inferior to the first, because ‘begotten,’ and the third to the second, for the same reason.” “God,” says M. Saisset, “is threefold, and yet a whole. The divine nature, conceived as absolutely simple, admits of division; at the pinnacle of the scale soars Unity; beneath it Intelligence, identical with Being, or the Logos; in the third rank, the Universal Soul, or the Spirit. We have not here three gods, but three hypostases of the same God. An Hypostasis is not a substance, it is not an attribute, it is not a mode, it is not a relation. Unity is above Intelligence and Being, it is above Reason; it is incomprehensible and ineffable; without Intelligence itself, it generates Intelligence; it gives birth to Being, and is not itself Being. Intelligence, in its turn, without motion or activity as it is, produces the Soul, which is