Poole, Reginald S.: The cities of Egypt (London, 1882)

196

CITIES OF EGYPT.

early became a centre of Christian thought. Nowhere
so much as here did the new religion grow and prosper.
Nowhere did she receive so much from older modes
of thought. The Platonist saw in Christianity a fuller
and clearer embodiment of the noble Ideas of his
philosophy than could be seen in Judaism ; the Hebrew
saw in it the extension of t%; faith of Abraham and the
promises to the whole race of man ; the Egyptian saw
in it the great doctrines of the divine unity and man's
future condition, which had only just disappeared from
his religion in the shock of its contact with philosophy.
The Greek vehicle which gave the expressions of Hebrew
thought a definiteness they had hitherto wanted, yet
which limited that luminous vagueness which has in
it the living principle of development, was of neces-
sity accepted by the Christianity as by the Judaism of
Alexandria. But Hebrew thought reacted upon Greek
form ; the first translations were the work of Hebrews,
and the medium was deeply coloured by their use.
Thus the Greek of the early Church was not purely
Hellenic ; rather it was an intermediate mode of ex-
pression, retaining somewhat of the old expansiveness,
marked by somewhat of the new limitation. Alexandrian