As an emanation (the begotten) he is distinguished from all creatures, for he alone is the Son;[436] but, as having a beginning, he again stands on a level with them. Hence the paradoxical expression, [Greek: ergon prototokon tou patros] ("first begotten work of the Father"), is here the most appropriate designation. (4) In virtue of his finite origin, it is possible and proper for the Logos to enter into the finite, to act, to speak, and to appear. As he arose for the sake of the creation of the world, he has the capacity of personal and direct revelation which does not belong to the infinite God; nay, his whole essence consists in the very fact that he is thought, word, and deed. Behind this active substitute and vicegerent, the Father stands in the darkness of the incomprehensible, and in the incomprehensible light of perfection as the hidden, unchangeable God.[437] With the issuing forth of the Logos from God began the realisation of the idea of the world. The world as [Greek: kosmos noetos] is contained in the Logos. But the world is material and manifold, the Logos is spiritual and one. Therefore the Logos is not himself the world, but he is its creator and in a certain fashion its archetype. Justin and Tatian used the expression "beget" [Greek: gennan] for the creation of the world, but in connections which do not admit of any importance being attached to this use. The world was created out of nothing after a host of spirits, as is assumed by most Apologists, had been created along with heaven, which is a higher, glorious world. The purpose of the creation of the world was and is the production of men, i.e., beings possessed of soul and body, endowed with reason and freedom, and therefore made in the image of God; beings who are to partake of the blessedness and perfection of God. Everything is created for man's sake, and his own creation is a proof of the goodness of God. As beings possessed of soul and body, men are neither mortal nor immortal, but capable either of death or immortality.[438] The condition on which men can attain the latter introduces us to ethics. The doctrines, that God is also the absolute Lord of matter; that evil cannot be a quality of matter, but rather arose in time and from the free decision of the spirits or angels; and finally that the world will have an end, but God can call the destroyed material into existence, just as he once created it out of nothing, appear in principle to reconcile the dualism in the cosmology. We have the less occasion to give the details here, because they are known from the philosophical systems of the period, especially Philo's, and vary in manifold ways. All the Apologists, however, are imbued with the idea that this knowledge of God and the world, the genesis of the Logos and cosmos, are the most essential part of Christianity itself.[439] This conception is really not peculiar to the Apologists: in the second century the great majority of Christians, in