Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

POWER OF THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY 327years of this period. Then, again, I have describedanother movement which was affected by Philo, andrepresented by Plutarch, Dio Chrysostomus, MaximusTyrius, Apuleius, and Celsus. In so doing I touchedupon the functions which philosophy attempted toexecute in the private life of the Komans and by theteaching of its professorial chairs in the great centresof Athens, Alexandria, and Rome itself. Before theend of the second century this latter school of thoughthad obtained a complete predominance. In the romanceof Philostratus we have seen it exhibited at full lengthin an ideal portrait of Apollonius. With it anotherlife of an imaginary Pythagoras by lamblichus, whichseems to have been published in the reign of Con-stantine,1 is identical in spirit. But the movementis already complete and final, and the last standing-ground of defence taken up when, two hundredyears after Seneca, Plotinus, in a series of lecturesat Eome, unfolds to the cultured classes of the greatmetropolis of heathendom the system by which hehopes to stem the progress of the Christian religion.It is the system which gathers up for a final effortthe whole force of pagan philosophy, and fights forthe multitude of gods with the arms of the pantheisticunity. I have just considered the three oppositionspresented by that system to the Christian Faith, thefirst and second in its conception of God, and of Hisconnection with the world, and*the third as shown inthat whole relation between God and man which maybe termed the collective result of the former twoprinciples. Having then dealt with the developmentof heathen doctrine over against the doctrine of the1 Zeller, v. 613, n. 2, remarks that the death of lamblichus may beset about 330.