Christianity had no need to borrow from Greek philosophy either the idea of the unity of God, or the belief that He made the world. Its ultimate basis was the belief in one God. It rode in upon the wave of the reaction against polytheism. The Scriptures to which it appealed began with the sublime declaration, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It accepted that declaration as being both final and complete. It saw therein the picture of a single supreme Artificer: and it elaborated the picture by the aid of anthropomorphic conceptions: “By His almighty power He fixed firm the heavens, and by His incomprehensible wisdom He set them in order: He separated the earth from the water that encompassed it ... and last of all He formed man with His sacred and spotless hands, the impress of His own image.”[344] The belief that the one God was the Creator of heaven and earth came, though not without a struggle, to be a foremost and permanent element in the Christian creed. The various forms of ditheism which grew up with it and around it, finding their roots in its unsolved problems and their nutriment in the very love of God which it fostered, gradually withered away. But in proportion as the belief spread widely over the Greek world, the simple Semitic cosmogony became insufficient. The questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain? These questions of the mode of creation and of the relation of God to the material world, and the underlying question which any answer to them must at the same time solve, fill a large place in the history of the first three centuries. The compromise which ultimately resulted has formed the basis of Christian theology to the present day. * * * * *