prodigy; nor is the world a lifeless machine blindly working after some preordained method, and only feeling the presence of God in so far as he now and then sees fit to interfere with its normal course of procedure. On the contrary, God is the ever-present life of the world; it is through him that all things exist from moment to moment, and the natural sequence of events is a perpetual revelation of the divine wisdom and goodness. In accordance with this fundamental view, Clement, for example, repudiated the Gnostic theory of the vileness of matter, condemned asceticism, and regarded the world as hallowed by the presence of indwelling Deity. Knowing no distinction "between what man discovers and what God reveals," he explained Christianity as a natural development from the earlier religious thought of mankind. It was essential to his idea of the divine perfection that the past should contain within itself all the germs of the future; and accordingly he attached but slight value to tales of miracle, and looked upon salvation as the normal ripening of the higher spiritual qualities of man "under the guidance of immanent Deity." The views of Clement's disciple Origen are much like those of his master. Athanasius ventured much farther into the bewildering regions of metaphysics. Yet in his doctrine of the Trinity, by which he overcame the visible tendency toward polytheism in the theories of Arius, and averted the threatened danger of a compromise between Christianity and Paganism, he proceeded upon the lines which Clement had marked out. In his very suggestive work on "The Continuity of Christian Thought," Professor Alexander Allen thus sets forth the Athanasian point of view: "In the formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as three distinct and coequal members in the one divine essence, there was the recognition and the reconciliation of the philosophical schools which had divided the ancient world. In the idea of the eternal Father the Oriental mind recognized what it liked to call the profound abyss of being, that which lies back of all phenomena, the hidden mystery which lends awe to human minds seeking to know the divine. In the doctrine of the eternal Son revealing the Father, immanent in nature and humanity as the life and light shining through all created things, the divine reason in which the human reason shares, there was the recognition of the truth after which Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were struggling,--the tie which binds the creation to God in the closest organic relationship. In the doctrine of the Holy Spirit the church guarded against any pantheistic confusion of God with the world by upholding the life of the manifested Deity as essentially ethical or spiritual, revealing itself in humanity in its highest form, only in so far as humanity recognized its calling and through the Spirit entered into communion with the Father and the Son."