Perhaps it was not fair in Origen to accuse Celsus of being ashamed of his Epicureanism, and of concealing his own philosophical and atheistic convictions, in order to obtain an easier hearing among Jews and Christians.(6) This does not appear quite fair, for it was a very pardonable device for Celsus first to attack a part of Christian teaching under the mask of a Jew, who represents his faith as the older and more respectable, and seeks to convince the Christians that they would have done better had they remained true to the religion of their fathers. On the contrary, as Celsus, whatever he may have been except a Jew, could not with a good conscience have undertaken an actual defence of Judaism, it was quite natural that he should choose a Jew as an advocate of the Jewish religion, and put into his mouth, like a second Philo, ideas which at all events sound more Platonic than Epicurean. Origen was entirely justified in showing that in this process Celsus frequently forgot his part; and this he did with much skill. But whatever Celsus may have been,—an Epicurean, or, as has occasionally been maintained, a Neo-platonist,—he was at all events no mean adversary and certainly not unworthy of Origen’s steel. If not, why should Origen have felt the need of such an earnest refutation? He says, certainly, that he did it only at the request of his old friend and protector, Ambrosius. But that is what many writers under similar circumstances have said and still say. We have, at all events, lost much through the loss (or destruction?) of all manuscripts of Celsus. Not only was he acquainted with the principal philosophical schools of antiquity, he appears also to have studied zealously the religions of the ancient world as they were known at that time to the learned, especially in Alexandria, of which we have but scant knowledge. Origen expressly states (I, 14) that Celsus described the various peoples who possessed religious and philosophical systems, because he supposed that all these views bore a certain relationship to one another. Without a doubt much has been here lost to us, not only for the history of Greek philosophy, but also for the history of Oriental religions and philosophies, whose representatives at that time sojourned in Alexandria, yet as to whose personal influence we are almost entirely in the dark. Celsus is presumed to have written of the doctrines of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Jews, Persians, Odrysians, Samothracians, Eleusinians, even of the Samaneans, _i.e._ the Buddhists (I, 24), and to have represented these as better accredited than those of the Jews. We see anew what treasures were stored up in Alexandria, and we feel all the more deeply their irrevocable loss. The desire and the hope of recovering the work of Celsus were therefore quite natural for any who wished to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual atmosphere of the second and third centuries, and especially for such as strove to