school, the distinction between intellectual and material existence tended to vanish. The powers which flowed forth from God were at once intellectual and material, corresponding to the monistic conception of God Himself. They were subtler and more active forms of matter acting upon its grosser but plastic forms. In the conception of another school, God is the unbegotten seed of which the Tree of Being is the leaves and fruit,[351] and the fruit again contains in itself infinite possibilities of renewing the original seed.[352] The obvious difficulty which the actual world, with its failures and imperfections, presents to all theories of evolution which assume the existence of a good and perfect God, was bridged over by the hypothesis of a lapse. The “fall from original righteousness” was carried back from the earthly Paradise to the sphere of divinity itself. The theory was shaped in various ways, some of which are expressed by almost unintelligible symbols. That of the widely-spread school of Valentinus was, that the Divine Wisdom herself had become subject to passion, and that, having both ambition and desire, she had produced from herself a shapeless mass, in ignorance that the Unbegotten One alone can, without the aid of another, produce what is perfect. Out of this shapeless mass, and the passions that came forth from her, arose the material world and the Demiurgus who fashioned it.[353] Another theory was that of revolt and insurrection among the supernal powers.[354] Both theories simply pushed the difficulty farther back: they gave no solution of it: they were opposed as strongly by philosophers outside Christianity as they were by polemical theologians within it:[355] they helped to pave the way for the Augustinian theology of succeeding centuries, but they did not themselves win permanent acceptance either in philosophy or in theology, in either the Eastern or the Western world. 2. Side by side with these hypotheses of evolution was a tendency, which ultimately became supreme, to account for the world by the hypothesis of creation. It was the result of the action of God upon already existing matter. It was not evolved, but ordered or shaped. God was the Builder or Framer: the universe was a work of art.[356] But this, no less than the monistic hypothesis, contained grave difficulties, arising partly from the metaphysical conception of God, and partly from the conception of moral evil. Three main questions were discussed in connection with it: (i.) What was the ultimate relation of matter to God? (ii.) How did God come into contact with it so as to shape it? (iii.) How did a God who was almighty as well as beneficent come to create what is imperfect and evil?