Quoted by Blow, A Study of Dante (1887), p. 102.
[423] Cf. above, p. 44; see also Toy, Judaism and Christianity (1891), p. 387; Hall, History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 216.
[424] The Pharisees; cf. Acts xxiii. 6–8.
[425] We see a repetition of all this in what is going on to-day among the Jews in the great cities of the New World. Liberal Judaism is largely the outcome of just such influences as brought forth Christianity out of the narrow ritual Judaism of the Alexandrian Age. See David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (1907), chap. xii.
[426] “Those psalms into which a sense of something like the brotherhood of nations begins to penetrate are for various reasons later than 382 B.C.... Not till the coming of the Macedonian reconciler of East and West could there be a presentiment of the truth of the divine education, not only of Israel, but of the human race.”—Cheyne, Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898), pp. 134 f.
[427] To Hillel is credited the maxim, “What thou wouldst not have another do to thee, do not thou to another.”
[428] The teaching of the Orphic sects that there are two elements, one good and another bad, in man’s nature, was an esoteric doctrine which had no influence on the popular mind and conscience. Cf. G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, 6th ed., pp. 31 f.
[429] There are, it is true, gods of the lower world unfriendly to man, but there is nothing in the Greek world-view corresponding to the Egyptian conception of the struggle between the good Osiris and the wicked Set, or of the Persian idea of the conflict between the beneficent Ahura Mazda and the evil-working Ahriman. Nor was there anything in this view like the Babylonian or Persian notion of malicious spirits.
[430] The Dionysian cult fostered art, but not directly morality. In so far as the Attic drama was an elevating moral influence, the cult may be said to have indirectly promoted morals. But the foreign orgiastic god had to be thoroughly converted before he could strengthen others.
[431] The pre-Hellenic Oriental cult of Aphrodite had undoubtedly an unfavorable influence on morality. “Some part of this evil character [was] transplanted into Greek legend, but very little into Greek worship.... What we know is that until the declining period of Greek history the cult of Aphrodite, so far as it appears in written or monumental record, was as pure and austere as that of Zeus and Athena” (Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. ii, pp. 657, 663).