This creed of Irenæus and his school became the basis of the theology of later Christendom. It appealed, as time went on, to a widening sphere, and summed up the judgment of average Christians on the main philosophical questions of the second century. The questions were not seriously re-opened. The idealists of Alexandria, no less than the rhetoricians of Gaul, accepted, with all its difficulties, the belief that there was one God who revealed Himself to mankind by the Word by whom He had created them, and that this Word was manifested in Jesus Christ. But the Alexandrians were concerned less with the metaphysical than with the moral difficulties; and their view of those difficulties modified also their view of creation. The cosmogony of Origen was a theodicy. His aim was less to show in detail how the world came into existence, than to “justify the ways of God to man.” He proceeded strictly on the lines of the older philosophies, justifying in this part of his theology even more than in other respects the criticism of Porphyry,[373] that though in his manner of life he was a Christian, in his opinions about God he was a Greek. He followed the school of Philo in believing that the original creation was of a world of ideal or “intelligible” existences, and that the cause of creation was the goodness of God.[374] He differed from, or expanded, the teaching of that school in believing that the Word or Wisdom of God, by whom He made the world, was not impersonal, but His Son, and that both the existence of the Son and the creation of the ideal world had been from all eternity.[375] For it is impious to think that God ever existed without His Wisdom, possessing the power to create but not the will; and it is inconceivable either that Wisdom should ever have been without the conception of the world that was to be, or that there should ever have been a time at which God was not omnipotent from having no world to govern.[376] The relation of each to the world is stated in varying ways: one mode of statement is, that from the Father and the Son, thus eternally co-existent, came the actual world; the Father caused it to be, the Son caused it to be rational:[377] another is, that the whole world, visible and invisible, was made by the agency of the only begotten Son, who conveyed a share in himself to certain parts of the things so created and caused them thereby to become rational creatures.[378] This visible world, which, as also Philo and the Platonists had taught, is a copy of the ideal world, took its beginning in time: but it is not the first, nor will it be the last, of such worlds.[379] The matter of it as well as the form was created by God.[380] It was made by Him, and to Him it will return. The Stoical theory had conceived of the universe as analogous to a seed which expands to flower and fruit and withers away, but leaves behind it a similar seed which has a similar life and a