In effect, Christianity had become polytheistic; and were it not that the personalities of Father, Mother and Son satisfied the average religious need, as it had so long done in pre-Christian Egypt, the dispute actually begun by Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople in the fourth century over the modality of the Holy Ghost would have gone as far as those over the Son and "the Mother of God." In its first stage, the conception of the Holy Spirit, so vague and purposeless in the orthodox doctrine, would seem to have been distinctly that of a feminine Deity. We know from Origen that in the lost gospel of the Hebrews Jesus was made to speak of "My Mother the Holy Spirit." This was a heretical reversion, on Judæo-Gnostic lines, to the original Semitic theosophy, according to which every God had his female counterpart; but ordinary Jewish monotheism, which had put aside the female Spirit (Ruach) of its older lore, was sufficiently strong to prevent the acceptance of such a heresy in the gospel-making period; and the accepted gospel birth-myth was better adapted to the general purposes of the cult. For the paganized Church, finally, the divinization of Mary was a simple matter, as we have seen; and the Holy Spirit, which had obscurely entered the orthodox myth in a form really Samaritan, but permitted by Judaic doctrine, thenceforth remained a gratuitous enigma, capping the mystery of the co-eternal Father and Begotten Son. The Eastern Church, recoiling from a reiteration of the latter countersense, decided (381) that the Spirit "proceeded from" the Father, but not from the Son, thus virtually depriving the Son, after all, of his so-often affirmed equality. The root of the difficulty, as of the Trinitarian dogma in general, is to be seen in the old Egyptian pantheism, according to which the all-comprehending Amun "is at once the Father, the Mother, and the Son of God"; but even as the Amunite priests made play with the Son-God Khonsu after affirming the oneness of Amun, so the Christian priesthood was forced at every step to distinguish the Son while affirming the oneness of the Trinity; and each new dogma was a fresh ground for the old quarrel. In the end the Western Church rejected this Eastern heresy as it did the Monothelite; and the Council of Toledo (589) added to the creed the Filioque clause, thus stating that the Spirit proceeded from the Father "and from the Son." But at this point the Eastern Church remained obstinate; it admitted that the Spirit came through the Son, but would not say it "proceeded from" the Son; and the Filioque clause remained a standing ground of feud between East and West, as well as a standing instance of the irrationality of the orthodox system. It is no wonder that in the seventh century eastern churchmen were still writing treatises against paganism, which, despite all the penal laws, persisted in virtue of its incoherent simplicity as against the systematic unintelligibility of the Christian creed.