Mr. W. E. Ball concedes that the Logos-idea was prevalent in the East long before the time of the Evangelist, and in this connection he refers to the Vedic vach or speech. This notion also possibly emanated from a cosmogony similar to that found in Genesis. He proceeds to say "that the editors of the Septuagint deliberately set themselves to soften down those passages in the earlier books of the Bible which were conceived to be most open to the charge of anthropomorphism. A single example will suffice. In Exodus xxiv. 9-11 it is related that Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders, ascended Mount Sinai '_and saw the God of Israel_.' The Hebrew text is clear beyond dispute; but in the Septuagint the passage reads, 'and saw the place where the God of Israel stood.'" Then we are referred to the "one living and true God, who, according to the Christian articles of faith, is without body, parts, or passions." As, however, in the Christian Scriptures it was recorded that he had been seen and conversed with, it became necessary to assume an emanation or intermediary power for this speaking and visible phase of God; hence, first, the unpersonified Logos of Philo, and afterwards the Logos made flesh in the person of Jesus according to St. John. The writer thinks that, however much the conception of Philo in the direction of a Logos as the Son of God may be minimized in its importance (on account of Philo's silence on the divine human as a Messiah) with reference to its bearing upon the writings of St. John, there is no doubt that Philo supplied "a theological vocabulary for the expression of Johannine and Pauline doctrine." "St. John grasped Philo's conception of the word as not only the revelation of the _silent_ God, but also as a reflection of the invisible God." "Jesus never described himself as the son of God." Such endeavours, however, as the above to fix the genesis and growth of an idea from a concrete statement in a book, and to hypothecate its translation from one leader of thought to another, leaves out of reckoning the possibility of ideas finding a place in individual minds by means of a mystical faculty, or what is commonly called revelation. This mystical faculty is the power of sublimating ideas, a power, evolved from materialities, that, at a certain stage of thought, produces a capacity for abnormal insight into the nature of things, a capacity that can be developed by training; that is to say, when the faculty of knowledge becomes so far removed from the mechanical influences of the brain that its connection with the nervous system may be considered to be on the verge of absolute severance. This faculty is due to no individualized external power, but is simply a development from the totality of things, their inherent qualities, their relationship and interactions.