“No one can know the Father except by the Word of God, that is by the Son revealing Him: nor can any one know the Son except by the good pleasure of the Father. But the Son performs the good pleasure of the Father: for the Father sends, and the Son is sent and comes. And His Word knows that the Father is, as far as concerns us, invisible and unlimited: and since He is ineffable, He himself declares Him to us: and, on the other hand, it is the Father alone who knows His own Word: both these truths has the Lord made known to us. Wherefore the Son reveals the knowledge of the Father by manifesting Himself: for the manifestation of the Son is the knowledge of the Father: for all things are manifested by the Word.... The Father therefore has revealed Himself to all by making His Word visible to all: and conversely the Word showed to all the Father and the Son, since He was seen by all. And therefore the righteous judgment of God comes upon all who, though they have seen as others, have not believed as others. For by means of the creation itself the Word reveals God the Creator; by means of the world, the Lord who is the Fashioner of the world; and by means of His handiwork (man), the Workman who formed it; and by the Son, that Father who begat the Son.”[529] (3) _The Distinctions in the Nature of God, or the Mediation and Mediator._—It was by a natural process of development that Christian philosophers, while acquiescing in the general proposition that Jesus Christ was the _Logos_ in human form, should go on to frame large theories as to the nature of the _Logos_. It was an age of definition and dialectic. It was no more possible for the mass of educated men to leave a metaphysical problem untouched, than it is possible in our own days for chemists to leave a natural product unanalyzed. Two main questions engaged attention: (i.) what was the genesis, (ii.) what was the nature, of the _Logos_. In the speculations which rose out of each of these questions, the influence of Greek thought is even more conspicuous than before. (i.) The question of the genesis of the _Logos_ was mainly answered by theories which were separated from one another by the same broad line of distinction which separated theories as to the genesis of the world. The philosophers of the school of Basilides, who, as we have seen, had been the first to formulate the doctrine of an absolute creation, that is, of a creation of all things out of nothing, conceived that whatever in their theory corresponded to the _Logos_ was equally included with all other things in the original seed. Hence came the definite proposition, which played a large part in the controversies of the fourth century, that the _Logos_ was made “out of the things that were not.”[530]