1. The first of these was the tendency to define. The earliest Christians had been content to believe in God and to worship Him, without endeavouring to define precisely the conception of Him which lay beneath their faith and their worship. They looked up to Him as their Father in heaven. They thought of Him as one, as beneficent, and as supreme. But they drew no fence of words round their idea of Him, and still less did they attempt to demonstrate by processes of reason that their idea of Him was true. But there is an anecdote quoted with approval by Eusebius[229] from Rhodon, a controversialist of the latter part of the second century, which furnishes a striking proof of the growing strength at that time of the philosophical temper. It relates the main points of a short controversy between Rhodon and Apelles. Apelles was in some respects in sympathy with Marcion, and in some respects followed the older Christian tradition. He refused to be drawn into the new philosophizing current; and Rhodon attacked him for his conservatism. “He was often refuted for his errors, which indeed made him say that we ought not to inquire too closely into doctrine; but that as every one had believed, so he should remain. For he declared that those who set their hopes on the Crucified One would be saved, if only they were found in good works. But the most uncertain thing of all that he said was what he said about God. He held no doubt that there is One Principle, just as we hold too: but when I said to him, ‘Tell us how you demonstrate that, or on what grounds you are able to assert that there is One Principle,’ ... he said that he did not know, but that that was his conviction. When I thereupon adjured him to tell the truth, he swore that he was telling the truth, that he did not know _how_ there is one unbegotten God, but that nevertheless so he believed. Then I laughed at him and denounced him, for that, giving himself out to be a teacher, he did not know how to prove what he taught.”