The latter hypothesis is an extension of the Platonic distinction between the perfect world which God created directly through the operation of His own powers, and the world of mortal and imperfect existences the creation of which He entrusted to inferior agents. In the Platonic conception, God Himself, in a certain mode of His activity, was the Creator (Demiurgus), and the inferior agents were beings whom He had created.[368] In the conception which grew up early in the second century, and which was first formulated by Marcion, the Creator was detached from the Supreme God, and conceived as doing the work of the inferior agents. He was subordinate to the Supreme God and ultimately derived from Him:[369] but looming large in the horizon of finite thought, He seemed to be a rival and an adversary. The contradictions, the imperfections, the inequalities of both condition and ability, which meet us in both the material and the moral world, were solved by the hypothesis of two worlds in conflict, each of them moving under the impulse of a separate Power. The same solution applied also to the contrast of the Old and New Testaments. It had been already thought that the God of the Jews was different from the Father of Jesus Christ; but, with an exaggerated Paulinism, Marcion made so deep a chasm between the Law and the Gospel, the Flesh and the Spirit, that the two were regarded as inherently hostile, and the work of the Saviour was regarded as bringing back into the world from which he had been shut out the God of love and grace.[370] The objection to all this was that, in spite of its reservations and safeguards, it tended to ditheism. The philosophical difficulties of monotheism were enormous, but the knot was not to be cut by the hypothesis of either a co-existent and resisting matter or an independent and rival God. The enormous wave of belief in the Divine Unity, which had gathered its strength from the whole sea of contemporary thought, swept away the barriers in its path. The moral difficulty was solved, as we shall see in the next Lecture, by the conception of free-will: the metaphysical difficulties of the contact of God with matter were solved, partly by the conception that God created matter, and partly by the conception that He moulded it into form by His Logos, who is also His Son, eternally co-existent with Him. The first patristic statement of this view is in Irenæus; it stands in the forefront of his theology: and it seems to have been so generally accepted in the communities of which he was cognizant, that he states it as part of the recognized “rule of truth:” the following is only one of several passages in which he so states it:[371]