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The "Questions and Answers" are essentially Hebraic in form, designed for Jews who knew and studied their Bible; and we can feel in them the influences of a training in traditional Mishnah and Midrash; but Philo passed from them to a more artistic expression and a more thoroughly Hellenized presentation of the philosophy of the Bible.
The pure Jews can have no part in such insight, because it contradicts the positivism of their religion and character and their ideal of worldly happiness. As the human body is said to change all its substance every seven years, and yet is the same body, so the Hebraic conscience might change all its tenets in seven generations and be the same conscience still.
Then as long as play lasts there is a concentration of dark hebraic eyes on the table, which would seem to draw the gold pieces lying there as if by an invisible thread.... Then there are the quarrels. Fights. Oaths in many languages. Knives are drawn. A guard arrives.
This is owing partly, perhaps, to the fact that in his earlier writings he masked his sentiments both in Hebraic and Christian phraseology; and partly to the lack of vision in his admirers, who could not distinguish a new thought in an old garment.
The talesman, of course, inevitably replied in the negative. "Thank you, sir," Purdy would continue: "In that event you are entirely acceptable!" Not long ago two shrewd Irish attorneys were engaged in defending a client charged with an atrocious murder. The defendant had the most Hebraic cast of countenance imaginable, and a beard that reached to his waist.
I had been pointing out how Christianity had flowered into romance, and how the crude Hebraic materialism and all the later formalities of an established creed had fallen away from the tree of life and left us the exquisite ideals of the new paganism. . . .
He expected to see some ancient and Hebraic figure present itself instead, light steps came from some recess of the shop, and Lauriston found himself gazing in surprise at a young and eminently pretty girl, who carried some fancy needle-work in her hand, and looked over it at him out of a pair of large, black eyes. For a moment the two gazed at each other, in silence.
His fortune and his life had gone in the same high careless manner for the thing he sought. For the treasure that he believed lay in the Gobi Desert not for himself, but for every man to be born into the world. He was the great dreamer, the great idealist, a vague shining figure before the girl like the cloud in the Hebraic Myth. The girl stood up and linked her fingers together behind her back.
As though furnishing a description for the police, he began to enumerate: "Hair, dark and curly; eyes, poppy; lips, full; nose, Roman or Hebraic, according to taste. Do you see?" He shrugged his shoulders. "But it didn't work," he concluded. "I picked the wrong Jew." His face grew serious. "Do you suppose that Smedburg person has wirelessed that banker?"
It is the old Hebraic attitude toward life and God. Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural law everywhere prevailing; a change, which the mutability of all material creations renders necessary, and salutary, and, when received without the prejudices engendered by education, pleasing. Religion has nothing to do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life.
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