The complete contrast between the perfect, supramundane God and the imperfect, transient world required the Apologists, like the later pagan philosophers, to postulate some agent connecting the two, and they, like Philo and others, found this in the Logos, which to them was the operative reason of God, regarded as a person. But there is this significant fact to be noted, that the Apologists reached their views with regard to God and the Logos from a contemplation of the world itself in which they saw reason and order, and detected spiritual forces working toward good ends. Therefore they believed that the world was created and directed by God’s reason. Reflection on the chain of rational causation had led them to their conclusions. But Philo and the later Platonists we might say conceived of the Logos as a remedial being, for through his mediation they saved the perfection of God from contamination with evil matter. To the Apologists, however, matter was only an indifferent finite substance. The Logos, as the reason of God, was identical with God in essence; but as a projection by God from himself, made for the purpose of creation and revelation, the Logos had a being distinct from God, not in essence but in number, so that he was a second God; yet at the same time the Logos, being a mode of God, God’s operative reason, was included in God; therefore no polytheistic ideas were admitted here.[341] The Logos then was regarded as a creature and a servant of God, but he was held to be above all other creatures, being one in essence with the Divine. Moreover being created and therefore finite from the point of view of time, the Logos could enter into the finite and thus do the work of creation and revelation; by the Logos the world was made out of finite matter, and man was endowed with reason and freedom of the will. It is a striking fact, however, that with the exception of Justin, the Apologists betray comparatively little interest in the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ. Their efforts were directed rather to establishing against the pagan world their claim that God is One and that the Logos is the operative reason of God which exercises his powers. Furthermore they had little or nothing to say about the Holy Spirit as a separate person, but for the most part they identified the Logos and the Spirit.[342]