The function of the church is thus an important one in the divine plan. For the fallen spirits try to rise by their own wills from the matter to which they are condemned for purification. They never lose their divine essence, however low they may fall. They cannot rise alone, nor are they compelled to, but they always have the help of divine grace, which is always active within man and has also been perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. After the manner of the Apologists, Origen makes use of the Stoic and Platonic conceptions, for the eternal Logos takes form in the divine-human unity of Jesus. Through His physical suffering redemption is made possible to all believers, and through His essence illumination has been brought to those especially inspired. There are different grades of redemption: faith, or a religious understanding of the perceptual world; knowledge of the Logos; final absorption in God. All shall finally be saved through the combined forces of freedom and Grace, and then shall all material existence disappear. The controversies within the church during the succeeding centuries over the theory of Origen are theological rather than philosophical, and so our account of the relation of Greek philosophy to Christianity in the Hellenic-Roman period closes here. Origen’s undertaking was a private one, approved at first in only limited circles and on the whole disapproved by the church. In his scientific dogmatics the particular changes which he planned pertain especially to the conception of salvation and the place of Christ in the universe. In his teaching about Christ he emphasized more the cosmological than the soteriological aspect, but neither was fully developed. The history of the early church shows that Christianity seized the ideas of ancient philosophy and insisted on revising them with its own religious principle before it used them. We shall find that the next period is introduced by a greater than Origen, in whom again the Christian and the ancient worlds will meet in new and richer combination,――St. Augustine. BOOK II THE MIDDLE AGES (476–1453) CHAPTER XV CHARACTERISTICS AND CONDITIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES