they were mainly two:--the Arabic pantheism, and the materialism which was fostered in the medical schools; kindred errors, both concerned with an undue estimate of matter. And how did Christian theology meet them? Not by laying stress, like the later Deists, upon God's infinite distance from the world, but upon the closeness of His intimacy with it: by reviving, that is, with increased emphasis the Patristic doctrine of the Incarnation, as the climax and the keystone of the whole visible creation. There is a greater divergence of opinion, perhaps, among the Schoolmen than among the Fathers; and a far greater amount of that unprofitable subtlety for which they are apt to be somewhat too unintelligently ridiculed. But on the point before us, as on all others of primary importance, they are substantially unanimous, and never fail in dignity. 'As the thought of the Divine mind is called the Word, Who is the Son, so the unfolding of that thought in external action (per opera exteriora) is named the word of the Word[196].' 'The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of that Word by which it was created[197].' 'Every creature is a theophany[198].' 'Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God[199].' 'The wisdom of God, when first it issued in creation, came not to us naked, but clothed in the apparel of created things. And then when the same wisdom would manifest Himself to us as the Son of God, and so was seen of men[200].' 'The Incarnation is the exaltation of human nature and consummation of the Universe[201].' Such quotations might be multiplied indefinitely from the pages of the Schoolmen and scholastic theologians. And the line of thought which they indicate seems to lead us by a natural sequence to view the Incarnation as being the predestined climax of creation, independently of human sin. The thought is of course a mere speculation, 'beyond that which is written,' but from its first appearance in the twelfth century it has been regarded with increasing favour; for it is full of rich suggestiveness, and seems to throw a deeper meaning into all our investigations of the world's gradual development. Again, from the relation of the Word to the universe follows His relation to the human mind. For 'that life was the light of men.'