creation of the ideal world had been from all eternity.1 For it is impious to think that God ever existed without His Wisdom, possessing the power to create but not the will; and it is inconceivable either that Wisdom should ever have been without the conception of the world that was to be, or that there should ever have been a time at which God was not omnipotent from having no world to govern.2 The relation of each to the world is stated in varying ways: one mode of statement is, that from the Father and the Son, thus eternally co-existent, came the actual world; the Father caused it to be, the Son caused it to be rational: 3 another is, that the whole world, visible and invisible, was made by the agency of the only begotten Son, who conveyed a share in himself to certain parts of the things so created and caused them thereby to become rational creatures.4 This visible world, which, as also Philo and the Platonists had taught, is a copy of the ideal world, took its beginning in time: but it is not the first, nor will it be the last, of such worlds.5 The matter of it as well as the form was created by God. It was made by Him, and to Him it will return. The Stoical theory had conceived of the universe as analogous to a seed which expands to flower and fruit and withers away, but leaves behind it a similar seed which has a similar life and a similar succession: so did one universal order spring from its beginning and pass through its appointed period to the end which was like the beginning in that after it all things began anew.

1 De princip. 1. 2. 2.
8 Ibid. 1. 3. 5, 6, 8.

5 Ibid. 3. 5. 3.

2 Ibid. 1. 2. 2, 10.

4 Ibid. 2. 6. 3.

6 Ibid. 2. 9. 4.

Origen's theory was a modification of this: it recognized an absolute beginning and an absolute end: both the beginning and the end were God: poised as it were between these two divine eternities were the worlds of which we are part. In them, all rational creatures were originally equal and free: they are equal no longer because they have variously used their freedom: and the hypothesis of more worlds than one is a complement, on the one hand of the hypothesis of human freedom, on the other hand of the hypothesis of the divine justice, because it accounts for the infinite diversities of condition, and gives scope for the discipline of reformation.

Large elements of this theory dominated in the theology of the Eastern Churches during the fourth century. But ultimately those parts of it which distinguished it from the theory of Irenæus faded away. The mass of Christians were content with a simpler creed. More than one question remained unsolved; and the hypothesis of creation by a rival God was part of the creed of a Church which flourished for several centuries before it faded away, and it also left its traces in many inconsistent usages within the circle of the communities which rejected it. But the belief in the unity of God, and in the identity of the one God with the Creator of the world, was never again seriously disturbed. The close of the controversy was marked by its transference to a different, though allied, area. It was no longer Theological but Christological. The expression "Monarchy," which had been used of the sole government of the one God, in distinction from the divided government of many gods, came to be applied to the sole government of the

Father, in distinction from the "economy" of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In this new area of controversy the old conceptions re-appear. The monistic and dualistic theories of the origin of the world lie beneath the two schools of Monarchianism, in one of which Christ was conceived as a mode of God, and in the other as His exalted creature. In the determination of these Christological controversies Greek philosophy had a no less important influence than it had upon the controversies which preceded them: and with some elements of that determination we shall be concerned in a future Lecture.

We may sum up the result of the influence of Greece on the conception of God in His relation to the material universe, by saying that it found a reasoned basis for Hebrew monotheism. It helped the Christian communities to believe as an intellectual conviction that which they had first accepted as a spiritual revelation. The moral difficulties of human life, and the Oriental influences which were flowing in large mass over some parts of the Christian world, tended towards ditheism. But the average opinion of thinking men, which is the ultimate solvent of all philosophical theories, had for centuries past been settling down into the belief in the unity of God. With a conviction which has been as permanent as it was of slow growth, it believed that the difficulties in the hypothesis of the existence of a Power limited by the existence of a rival Power, are greater even than the great difficulties in the belief in a God who allows evil to be. The dominant Theistic philosophy

of Greece became the dominant philosophy of Christianity. It prevailed in form as well as in substance. It laid emphasis on the conception of God as the Artificer and Architect of the universe rather than as its immanent Cause. But though the substance will remain, the form may change. Platonism is not the only theory that is consistent with the fundamental thesis that "of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things:" and it is not impossible that, even after this long lapse of centuries, the Christian world may come back to that conception of Him which was shadowed in the far-off ages, and which has never been wholly without a witness, that He is "not far off but very nigh;" that "He is in us and we in Him;" that He is changeless and yet changing in and with His creatures; and that He who "rested from His creation," yet so "worketh hitherto" that the moving universe itself is the eternal and unfolding manifestation of Him.

LECTURE VIII.

GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.

II. THE MORAL GOVERNOR.

A. THE GREEK IDEA.

1. THE idea of the unity of God had grown, as we have already seen, in a common growth with the idea of the unity of the world. But it did not absorb that idea. The dominant element in the idea of God was personality: in the idea of the world it was order. But personality implied will, and will seemed to imply the capacity to change; whereas in the world, wherever order could be traced, it was fixed and unvarying.

The order was most conspicuous in the movements of the heavenly bodies. It could be expressed by numbers. The philosopher of numbers was the first to give to the world the name Cosmos, the "order" as of a marshalled army. The order being capable of being expressed by numbers, partook of the nature of numerical relations. Those relations are not only fixed, but absolutely unalterable. That a certain ratio should be otherwise than what it is, is inconceivable. Hence the same philosopher of

1 Aetius ap. Plut. de plac. phil. 2. 1. 1 (Diels, p. 327), IIv@ayopas πρῶτος ὠνόμασε τὴν τῶν ὅλων περιοχὴν κόσμον ἐκ τῆς ἐν αὐτῷ τάξεως.

P