degrees of light, life, and spirit. At the head of this gradation is the celestial man, Adam Kadmon, 'the old or first Adam, who is united to the Infinite in and through the first ray, and is identical with that ray or word of God. He is the Macrocosm or great world, the archetype of the Microcosm or little world. In the celestial Adam we eternally exist. He is that wisdom, of whom it is said, that of old His delights were with the sons of men.

From En-soph emanate ten Sephiroths, or luminous circles. These represent the divine attributes. They manifest His wisdom, perfection and power. They are His vesture: "He clothes Himself with light as with a garment." By these He reveals Himself. They are also called the instruments which the supreme Architect employs in the operations of His ceaseless activity. They are not however instruments like the tools of an artizan, which may be taken up or laid down at pleasure. They are as the flame from the burning coal. They come from the essence of the Infinite. They are united to Him. As the flame discovers force which before lay concealed in the coal, so do these resplendent circles of light reveal the glory and the majesty of God. They are from Him, and of Him, as heat from the fire, and as rays from the sun; but they are not distinct from His Being. He suffers neither trouble nor sorrow when He gives them existence. They are no deprivation of His being; but as one flame kindles another without loss or violence, so the infinite Light sends forth His emanating Sephiroths. When the primordial ray, the first-born of God, willed to create the universe, He found two great difficulties. First, all space was full of this brilliant and subtle light, which poured forth from the divine Essence. The creative Word must therefore form a void in which to place the universe. For this end He pressed the light which surrounded Him, and this compressed light withdrew to the sides and left a vacuum in the centre. The second difficulty arose from the nature of the light. It was too abundant, and too subtle for the creation to be formed of it. The creative Word therefore made ten circles, each of which became less luminous in proportion as it was removed. from Himself. In this way, from En-soph to the meanest existence, we have a connected universe of being. The infinite light or emanation of the darkness is the All God. In His infinitude are placed all ranks and orders of existence. Around Him, in what we are compelled by the imperfection of thought and speech to call His immediate presence, are the pure spirits

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of the highest sphere. Then spiritual substances less perfect. After these are angels or spirits clothed with bodies of light, which serve both as a covering and as chariots to convey them whither they will. Then follow spirits imprisoned in matter, subject to the perpetual changes of birth and death. Last of all gross matter itself, that of which human bodies and the world are composed, the corruption of the pure divine substance deprived of the perfections of spirit, and light, and life,—divinity

obscured.

The Cabbalists believe in creation, but only in the sense of emanation. They do not find in Scripture that God made the world out of nothing. "From nothing, nothing comes " is with them an established doctrine. No one thing, they say, can be drawn from nothing. Non-existence cannot become existence. Either all things are eternal, which, they say is atheism, or they have emanated from the divine Essence. If it is objected how matter could emanate from God, they answer, that matter is not an actual existence, and in its logical annihilation they are not less successful than other philosophers. The efficient Cause being spirit, must, they say, produce what is like itself. Its effect must be a spiritual substance. True, indeed, there exists something gross, palpable, and material, but its existence is only negative-a privation of existence. As darkness is a privation of life, as evil is a privation of good, so is matter a privation of spirit. As well say that God made darkness, sin, and death, as say that He made the substances which we call sensible and material. The sum is-all is a manifestation of God. The divine Word is manifesting itself always, and in all places. Angels and men, beasts of the field and fowls of the air, animated insects, grains of sand on the sea-shore, atoms in the sunshine-all, so far as they do exist, have their existence in that which is Divine.

Authorities:-Mangey's Edition of the Works of Philo; the Translation of Philo in Bohn's Library; Dähne's Geschichtliche Darstellung der JüdischAlexandrischen Religions-Philosophie; Cabbala Denudata.

IT

CHAPTER V.

NEO-PLATONISM.

T is only Ammonius the porter, said some Alexandrians to each other. "He professes to teach the philosophy of Plato;" and they laughed contemptuously, thinking how much better it would suit him to be making his day's wages at the harbour instead of troubling his mind about essences and first principles, entelechies, potentialities, and actualities. But the Alexandrians were earnest truth seekers, and when Ammonius Saccas intimated that he was to lecture on philosophy, an audience was soon collected. Among this audience was a young man with a look of unusual earnestness. He had listened to many philosophers. He had questioned many sages. His search for truth had been deep and earnest, long and ardent; now he is about to abandon it as hopeless. The abyss of scepticism lies before him. He knows no alternative but to go onward to it; and yet his spirit pleads that there must be such a thing as truth within the reach of man. The universe cannot be a lie. On the verge of despair he listens to Ammonius, and ere many words had been spoken, he exclaims. "This is the man I am seeking." That pale, eager youth was the great Plotinus, the mystical spirit of Alexandria, who, with Plato in his hand, was destined to influence the religious philosophy of all succeeding ages. With the devotion of a true philosopher, Plotinus sat for eleven years at the feet of the Alexandrian porter. He then visited the East, that he might learn the philosophies of India and Persia. Rich in Asiatic speculation, he returned to Rome, and opened a school of philosophy. Charmed by his eloquence, multitudes of all ranks gathered around him. Men of science, physicians, senators, lawyers, Roman ladies, enrolled themselves as his disciples; nobles dying, left their children to the charge of the philosopher; bequeathing to him their property, to be expended for their children's benefit. Galienus wished to re-build Campania, and place him over it, that he might form a new society on the principles of Plato's republic. Strange and

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wonderful was the power over men possessed by this mystical philosopher. He discoursed of the invisible; and even the Romans listened. As he himself had been in earnest, so were men in earnest with him. What had he to tell them? What was the

secret of his power?

There was a new element in Plotinus which was not found in the old Greek philosophers. He was religious, he wished to be saved. Indeed, this word was used by the Neo-Platonists in the same sense as it was used by the church; only, the way of salvation for them was through philosophy. They sought to know God, and what revelation of truth God made to the human mind. Aristotle could pass with indifference from theology to mathematics, his sole object being to improve his intellectual powers; but Plotinus regarded philosophical speculation as a true prayer to God. He had, as he explains it, embraced the philosophical life, and it was the life of an angel in a human body. The object of knowledge was the object of love; perfect knowledge was perfect happiness, for, necessarily, from the right use of reason would follow the practice of virtue.

Neo-Platonism has been called Eclectic, and this rightly. It not only borrowed from other systems, but with some of them it sought to be identified; and on many points the identity is not to be disputed. That the senses alone could not be trusted had been abundantly proved, and individual reason only led to scepticism. The one remaining hope was in the universal reason. But between reason individual and reason universal, there is a great breach the former has but a partial participation in the latter, and is therefore defective. Common sense is the judgment of an aggregate of individuals, and is to be trusted to the extent that, that aggregate partakes of the universal reason. Beyond this no school of Greek philosophy had as yet advanced. A further step had been indicated by Parmenides and Plato, and is now consistently and logically made by Plotinus. That step was to identify the individual reason with the universal; but this could only be done by the individual losing itself in the universal. There is truth for man just in proportion as he is himself true. Let man rise to God, and God will reveal Himself to him. Let man be still before the awful majesty, and a voice will speak. In this divine teaching, inspiration or breath of God passing over us, is the only ground of truth. And the reason is, that our home from which we have strayed is in the bosom of the Infinite. He is near us at all times, but we do not feel His presence because we love self. Let

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REVELATION MADE TO REASON.

us put aside what holds us back from Him; all that weighs us down and prevents us ascending to the heights of divine contemplation. Let us come alone, and in solitude seek communion with the Spirit of the universe, and then shall we know Him who is the true and the Good. When we become what we were before our departure from Him, then shall we be able truly to contemplate Him, for in our reason He will then contemplate Himself. In this ecstacy, this enthusiasm, this intoxication of the soul, the object contemplated becomes one with the subject contemplating. The individual soul no longer lives. It is exalted above life. It thinks not, for it is above thought. It thus becomes one with that which it contemplates; which then is neither life nor thought, for it is above both. It is not correct to say that Plotinus abandoned reason for faith; he holds fast to reason, but it is human reason, at one with the Divine. To the mind thus true, thus united to universal reason, truth carries with it its own evidence.

Our knowledge begins with the sensuous world. The manifold is, at first, alone accessible to us. We cannot see that which is eternal till purified by long labours, prayers, and this particular illuminating grace of God. At first our weakness is complete; We must penetrate the nature of the world to learn to despise it, or, if it embraces any spark of true good, to seize it and use it to exalt our souls and lead them back to God. As Plato instructed by Heraclitus not to name a river, not even to point to it with his finger, yet fixed his eyes on the fleeting waters before contemplating the eternal Essence, so Plotinus stops for a mo-. ment among the phenomenal; seeing in sensation, not the foundation, but the occasion of science. The order of being is not disturbed by the changes in the sensuous world. That order must be the proper object of knowledge, and not those many individuals which are ever changing. There can only be a science of the universal, for that alone is permanent. We quit the phenomenal world for another; the eternal, immutable, and intelligible. There spirits alone penetrate, and there thought directly seizes essences. True knowledge is that which teaches us the nature of things, penetrates directly the nature of objects, and is not limited merely to the perception of images of them. This much had been established by Plato, and some think by Aristotle too; but Plotinus was carried beyond through this rational knowledge to a revelation or vision of the Infinite, granted to the soul that had been purified by mental and spiritual exercises.