In both respects they are frequently viewed, not in the plurality of their manifestations, but in the unity of their essence. On the one hand, they collectively form the world which the Divine Architect of the great City of the Universe fashioned in His mind before His thought went outside Him to stamp with its impress the chaotic and unformed mass. The place of this world is the _Logos_, the Reason or Will or Word of God: more precisely, it constitutes that _Logos_ in a special form of its activity:[335] for in the building of an ordinary city the ideal which precedes it “is no other than the mind of the architect, planning to realize in a visible city the city of his thought.... The archetypal seal, which we call the ideal world, is itself the archetypal pattern, the Form of Forms, the Reason of God.”[336] On the other hand, the Reason of God is sometimes viewed not as a Form but as a Force. It is His creative energy.[337] It is the instrument by which He made all things.[338] It is the “river of God” that is “full of waters,” and that flows forth to “make glad the city of God,” the universe.[339] From it, as from a fountain, all lower Forms and Forces flow. By another and even sublimer figure, it, the eldest born of the “I am,” robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high-priest’s robe, embroidered by all the Forces of the seen and unseen worlds.[340] But in all this, Philo never loses sight of the primary truth that the world was made not by inferior or opposing beings, but by God. It is the expression of His Thought. His Thought went forth from Him, impressing itself in infinite Forms and by means of infinite Forces: but though His Thought was the charioteer, it is God Himself who gives the orders.[341] By a different conception of the genesis of the world, and one that is of singular interest in view of the similar conceptions which we shall find in some Gnostic schools, God is the Father of the world:[342] and the metaphor of Fatherhood is expanded into that of a marriage: God is conceived as the Father, His Wisdom as the Mother: “and she, receiving the seed of God, with fruitful birth-pangs brought forth this world, His visible son, only and well-beloved.”[343] * * * * * We have now the main elements of the current conceptions out of which the philosophers of early Christianity constructed new fabrics.