The ditheistic hypothesis was itself more difficult than the difficulties which it explained. The writers who opposed it were helped, not only by the whole current of evangelical tradition, but also by the dominant tendencies of both philosophy and popular religion. They insisted that justice and goodness were not only compatible but necessarily co-existent in the Divine nature. Goodness meant not indiscriminating beneficence; justice meant not inexorable wrath: goodness and justice were combined in the power of God to deal with every man according to his deserts, including in the idea of deserts that of repentance. The solution is found in Irenæus, who argues that in the absence of either of the two attributes, God would cease to be God: “If the God who judges be not also good, so as to bestow favours on those on whom He ought, and to reprove those whom He should, He will be as a Judge neither wise nor just. On the other hand, if the good God be only good, and not also able to test those on whom He shall bestow His goodness, He will be outside goodness as well as outside justice, and His goodness will seem imperfect, inasmuch as it does not save all, as it should do if it be not accompanied with judgment. Marcion, therefore, by dividing God into two, the one a God who judges, and the other a God who is good, on both sides puts an end to God.”[423] It is found in Tertullian, who, after arguing on _à priori_ grounds that the one attribute implies the other, passes by an almost unconscious transition from physical to moral law: just as the “justice” of God in its physical operation controlled His goodness in the making of an orderly world, so in its moral operation it has, since the Fall, regulated His dealings with mankind.