Of this great theodicy, only part has been generally accepted. The Greek conceptions which underlie it, and which preceded it, have survived, but in other forms. Free-will, final causes, probation, have had a later history in which Greece has had no share. The doctrine of free-will has remained in name, but it has been so mingled on the one hand with theories of human depravity, and on the other with theories of divine grace, that the original current of thought is lost in the marshes into which it has descended. The doctrine of final causes has been pressed to an almost excessive degree as proving the existence and the providence of God; but His government of the human race has been often viewed rather as the blundering towards an ultimate failure than as a complete vindication of His purpose of creation. The Christian world has acquiesced in the conception of life as a probation; but while some of its sections have conceived of this life as the only probation, and others have admitted a probation in a life to come, none have admitted into the recognized body of their teaching Origen’s sublime conception of an infinite stairway of worlds, with its perpetual ascent and descent of souls, ending at last in the union of all souls with God. LECTURE IX. GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. III. GOD AS THE SUPREME BEING. It was in the Gentile rather than in the Jewish world that the theology of Christianity was shaped. It was built upon a Jewish basis. The Jewish communities of the great cities and along the commercial routes of the empire had paved the way for Christianity by their active propaganda of monotheism. Christianity won its way among the educated classes by virtue of its satisfying not only their moral ideals, but also their highest intellectual conceptions. On its ethical side it had, as we have seen, large elements in common with reformed Stoicism; on its theological side it moved in harmony with the new movements of Platonism.[455] And those movements reacted upon it. They gave a philosophical form to the simpler Jewish faith, and especially to those elements of it in which the teaching of St. Paul had already given a foothold for speculation. The earlier conceptions remained; but blending readily with the philosophical conceptions that were akin to them, they were expanded into large theories in which metaphysics and dialectics had an ample field. The conception, for example, of the one God whose kingdom was a universal kingdom and endured throughout all ages, blended with, and passed into, the philosophical conception of a Being who was beyond time and space. The conception that “clouds and darkness were round about Him,” blended with, and passed into, the philosophical conception of a Being who was beyond not only human sight but human thought. The conception of His transcendence obtained the stronger hold because it confirmed the prior conception of His unity; and that of His incommunicability, and of the