consequent need of a mediator, gave a philosophical explanation of the truth that Jesus Christ was His Son. A. THE IDEA AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY. But the theories which in the fourth century came to prevail, and which have formed the main part of speculative theology ever since, were the result of at least two centuries of conflict. At every stage of the conflict the conceptions of one or other of the forms of Greek philosophy played a decisive part; and the changing phases of the conflict find a remarkable parallel in some of the philosophical schools. The conflict may be said to have had three leading stages, which are marked respectively by the dominance of speculations as to (1) the transcendence of God, (2) His revelation of Himself, (3) the distinctions in His nature. (1) _The Transcendence of God._—Nearly seven hundred years before the time when Christianity first came into large contact with Greek philosophy, the mind of a Greek thinker, outstripping the slow inferences of popular thought, had leapt to the conception of God as the Absolute Unity. He was the ultimate generalization of all things, expressed as the ultimate abstraction of number:[456] He was not limited by parts or by bodily form: “all of Him is sight, all of Him is understanding, all of Him is hearing.” But it is probable that the conception in its first form was rather of a material than of an ideal unity:[457] the basis of later metaphysics was first securely laid by a second form of the conception which succeeded the first half-a-century afterwards. The conception was that of Absolute Being. Only the One really _is_: it was not nor will be: it _is_ now, and is everywhere entire, a continuous unity, a perfect sphere which fills all space, undying and immovable. Over against it are the Many, the innumerable objects of sense: they are not, but only seem to be: the knowledge that we seem to have of them is not truth, but illusion. But the conception, even in this second form, was more consistent with Pantheism than with Theism. It was lifted to the higher plane on which it has ever since rested by the Platonic distinction between the world of sense and the world of thought. God belonged to the latter, and not to the former. Absolute Unity, Absolute Being, and all the other terms which expressed His unique supremacy, were gathered up in the conception of Mind; for mind in the highest phase of its existence is self-contemplative: the modes of its expression are numerous, and perhaps infinite: but it can itself go behind its modes, and so retire, as it were, a step farther back from the material objects about which its modes employ themselves. In this sense God is transcendent (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), beyond the world of sense and matter. “God therefore is Mind, a form separate from all matter, that is to say, out of contact with it, and not involved with anything that is capable of being acted on.”[458]