That this conception of the Christ is not original with our author has already been said many times. It had been in the world two hundred years before his day, and had worked its way into the substance of the later Jewish thought. The personification of the divine reason early occurred to the Jews who had been touched with the passion for speculation in the city of Alexandria. Long ago attention was called by Andrews Norton, among ourselves, to bold personifications of wisdom and the divine reason, in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. "She is the breath of the power of God, a pure influence proceeding from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness." Chapters seven and eight of the Book of Wisdom contain an apotheosis of wisdom as the creative power. In the eighteenth chapter the imagery grows much stronger. "Thine almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man-of-war into the midst of a land of destruction." The twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus is devoted to the same theme. The Word is described as a being: the first born of God; the active agent in creation; having its dwelling-place in Israel, its seat in the Law of Moses. Philo pushes the speculation much further. The Logos is with him a most interesting subject of discourse, tempting him to wonderful feats of imagination. There is scarcely a personifying or exalting epithet that he does not bestow on the divine Reason. He describes it as a distinct being; calls it "A Rock," "The Summit of the Universe," "Before All Things," "First-begotten Son of God," "Eternal Bread from Heaven," "Fountain of Wisdom," "Guide to God," "Substitute for God," "Image of God," "Priest," "Creator of the Worlds," "Second God," "Interpreter of God," "Ambassador of God," "Power of God," "King," "Angel," "Man," "Mediator," "Light," "The Beginning," "The East," "The Name of God," "Intercessor." The curious on this subject may consult Lücke's Introduction to the Fourth Gospel, or Gfrörer's Philo, and he will be more than satisfied that the Logos of the fourth Gospel is the same as Philo's, and has the same origin. Christian scholars who admit this have been anxious to break the force of the inference, by allowing the similarity of the conception and then supposing the evangelist to have stated the doctrine that he might stamp it as heresy. But he nowhere does stamp it as heresy. He puts it boldly on the front of his exposition and constructs his whole work in conformity with it. Instead of refuting it or denouncing it, he carries the idea out in all its applications, supplementing it with a completeness that Philo never thought of.