We may sum up the result of the influence of Greece on the conception of God in His relation to the material universe, by saying that it found a reasoned basis for Hebrew monotheism. It helped the Christian communities to believe as an intellectual conviction that which they had first accepted as a spiritual revelation. The moral difficulties of human life, and the Oriental influences which were flowing in large mass over some parts of the Christian world, tended towards ditheism. But the average opinion of thinking men, which is the ultimate solvent of all philosophical theories, had for centuries past been settling down into the belief in the unity of God. With a conviction which has been as permanent as it was of slow growth, it believed that the difficulties in the hypothesis of the existence of a Power limited by the existence of a rival Power, are greater even than the great difficulties in the belief in a God who allows evil to be. The dominant Theistic philosophy of Greece became the dominant philosophy of Christianity. It prevailed in form as well as in substance. It laid emphasis on the conception of God as the Artificer and Architect of the universe rather than as its immanent Cause. But though the substance will remain, the form may change. Platonism is not the only theory that is consistent with the fundamental thesis that “of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things:” and it is not impossible that, even after this long lapse of centuries, the Christian world may come back to that conception of Him which was shadowed in the far-off ages, and which has never been wholly without a witness, that He is “not far off but very nigh;” that “He is in us and we in Him;” that He is changeless and yet changing in and with His creatures; and that He who “rested from His creation,” yet so “worketh hitherto” that the moving universe itself is the eternal and unfolding manifestation of Him. LECTURE VIII. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. II. THE MORAL GOVERNOR. A. THE GREEK IDEA. 1. The idea of the unity of God had grown, as we have already seen, in a common growth with the idea of the unity of the world. But it did not absorb that idea. The dominant element in the idea of God was personality: in the idea of the world it was order. But personality implied will, and will seemed to imply the capacity to change; whereas in the world, wherever order could be traced, it was fixed and unvarying.