in its first struggle with the non-Christian thought of the world, owed its victory chiefly, if not entirely, to the recognition of what, as we saw, forms the essential element of all religion, the recognition of the closest connexion between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, between the human soul and God. The bond of union between the two, which had been discovered by slow degrees by pagan philosophers and had been made the pivot of Christian philosophy at Alexandria, was the Logos. By the recognition of the Logos in Christ, a dogma which gave the direst offence to Celsus and other pagan philosophers, the fatal divorce between religion and philosophy had been annulled, and the two had once more joined hands. It is curious however to observe how some of the early Apologetes looked upon the Logos as intended rather to separate God from the world than to unite the two. It is true that Philo's mind was strongly impressed with the idea that the Divine Essence should never be brought into immediate contact with vile and corrupt matter, and to him therefore the intervening Logos might have been welcome as preventing such contact. But Christian philosophers looked upon matter as having been created by God, and though to them also the Logos was the intervening power by which God formed and ruled the world, they always looked upon their Logos as a connecting link and not as a dividing screen. It is true that in later times the original purpose and nature of the Logos were completely forgotten and changed. Instead of being a bond of union between the human and the Divine, instead of being accepted in the sense 1 Harnack, i. p. 443.

which the early Fathers had imparted to it as constituting the divine birthright of every man born into the world, it was used once more as a wall of partition between the Divine Logos, the Son of God (poroyerns viòs roû leoû), and the rest of mankind; so that not only the testimony of St. John, but the self-evident meaning of the teaching of Christ was made of no effect. No doubt St. Clement had then to be unsainted. but why not St. Augustine, who at one time was a great admirer of St. Clement and Origen, and who had translated and adopted the very words of St. Clement, that God became man in order that man might become God1. Not knowing the difference between Ocós and & 0eós, God and the God, later divines suspected some hidden heresy in this language of St. Clement and St. Augustine, and in order to guard against misapprehension introduced a terminology which made the difference between Christ and those whom He called His brothers, one of kind and not one of degree, thus challenging and defying the whole of Christ's teaching. Nothing can be more cautious yet more decided than the words of St. Clement 2: 'Thus he who believes in the Lord and follows the prophecy delivered by Him is at last perfected according to the image of the Master, moving about as God in the flesh. And still more decided is Origen's reply to Celsus iii. 28: That human nature through its communion with the more Divine should become divine not only in Jesus, but in all who through faith

1 See before, p. 323.

See Bigg, 1. c., p. 75.

3 Οὕτως ὁ τῷ κυρίῳ πειθόμενος καὶ τῇ δοθείσῃ δι ̓ αὐτοῦ κατακολουθήσας προφητεία τελέως ἐκτελεῖται κατ ̓ εἰκόνα τοῦ διδασκάλου ἐν σαρκὶ περιπολῶν Ocós. Clem. Strom. viii. 16, 95.

take up the life which Jesus taught. It is clear that Origen, taking this view of human nature, had no need of any other argument in support of the true divinity of Christ. He might as well have tried to prove his humanity against the Docetae. With him both were one and could only be one. To Origen Christ's divinity was not miraculous, or requiring any proof from moral or physical miracles. It was involved in his very nature, in his being the Logos or the Son of God in all its fulness, whereas the Logos in man had suffered and had to be redeemed by the teaching by the life and death of Christ. While Origen thus endeavoured to reconcile Greek philosophy, that is, his own honest convictions, with the teaching of the Church, he kept clear both of Gnosticism and Docetism. Origen was as honest as a Christian as he was as a philosopher, and it was this honesty which made Christianity victorious in the third century, and will make it victorious again whenever it finds supporters who are determined not to sacrifice their philosophical convictions to their religious faith or their religious faith to their philosophical convictions.

It is true that like St. Clement, Origen also was condemned by later ecclesiastics, who could not fathom the depth of his thoughts; but he never in the whole history of Christianity was without admirers and followers. St. Augustine, St. Bernard, the author of De Imitatione, Master Eckhart, Tauler, and others, honoured his memory, and Dr. Bigg is no doubt right

1 Ιν ̓ ἡ ἀνθρωπίνη τῇ πρὸς τὸ θειότερον κοινωνίᾳ γένηται θεία οὐκ ἐν μόνῳ τῷ Ἰησοῦ ἀλλὰ καὶ πᾶσι τοῖς μετὰ τοῦ πιστεύειν ἀναλαμβάνουσι βίον ὃν Ἰησοῦς ἐδίδαξεν.

2 Harnack, i. p. 594.

in saying1That there was no truly great man in the Church who did not love him a little.' And why ‘a little only'? Was it because he was disloyal to the truth such as he had seen it both in philosophy and in religion? Was it because he inflicted on himself such suffering as many may disapprove, but few will imitate (μωμήσεταί τις μᾶλλον ἢ μιμήσεται? If we consider the time in which he lived, and study the testimony which his contemporaries bore of his character, we may well say of him as of others who have been misjudged by posterity:

'Denn wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug gethan, Der hat gelebt für alle Zeiten.'

1 L. c., p. 279.

LECTURE XIV.

H

DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE.

The Logos in the Latin Church.

AVING shown, as I hope, that in the earliest theological representation of Christianity which we find in the Alexandrian Fathers of the Church, the most prominent thought is the same as that of the Vedanta, how to find a way from earth to heaven, or still better how to find heaven on earth, to discover God in man and man in God, it only remains to show that this ancient form of Christianity, though it was either not understood at all or misunderstood in later ages, still maintained itself under varying forms in an uninterrupted current from the second to the nineteenth century.

We can see the thoughts of St. Clement and Origen transplanted to the Western Church, though the very language in which they had to be clothed obscured their finer shades of meaning. There is no word in Latin to convey the whole of the meaning of Logos; again the important distinction between Ocós and d Oeós is difficult to render in a language which has no articles. The distinction between ousia and hypostasis was difficult to express, and yet an inaccurate rendering