committed all knowledge and judgment,” “who is before all things, and in whom all things consist,” “the image of the invisible God, in whom it pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell.”[176] And so it is not in the latest Gospel but in the earliest Scriptures that we have the first indications of this doctrine as Christ the Word, though in the latest, as we might expect, it is more clearly formulated and more fully expounded. Written after the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the ancient Church, and the recognition of the Gentiles as fellow-heirs, by one who was quite conscious of the new intellectual position which Christianity occupied in relation to the speculations of Syria and Egypt, and of the dangers which thereby accrued to the faith, its author took up a term very current at the time in theosophic and metaphysical writings, and specially those of Philo, to set forth the truth of the Life whose manifestation he had witnessed. That St. John did not borrow the term from Philo is evident from the very different use which he has made of it, and the very different purpose which he had in view. By it Philo expressed the conception of Divine intelligence in the abstract, while St. John employed it to suggest the concrete idea of God’s personal action. Both found it in the Septuagint and the Hebrew traditional lore;[177] but while Philo gave it a Greek, St. John adhered to its Hebrew significance. The first chapter of St. John compared with a page of Philo[178] will reveal at once the difference between them, and convince us that the teaching of Philo concerning the Logos leads further and further away from the idea of the incarnation which is the foundation-truth of the teaching of St. John. His doctrine would be quite unintelligible as an application or continuation of the doctrine of Philo, but it is intelligible and consistent as the final co-ordination of truths concerning the Divine Being disclosed in the Old Testament viewed by a man whose antecedents and modes of thought were very different from those of the Alexandrian sage.[179]