Jewish philosophers, while they adopted the word, only filled their old skins with new wine, with the natural consequence that the wine burst the old skins; but without spilling. For it was this which, in the hands of such men as the writer of the Fourth Gospel, as Hippolytus, Clement, Origen, and the best of the church fathers, gave them the strength and enthusiasm to triumph over the world, and especially over the strongholds of heathen religion, and even over Greek philosophy. Had the Fourth Evangelist wished to say that Christ was the divine Sophia or the Shekinah, or, as in Job, Wisdom as the fear of God, would he have said, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos became flesh, and lived among us, and we saw his glory, a glory as of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth?” Why not take the facts just as they are, and why wish to improve that which requires no human improvement? The Christian doctrine is and remains what it is; it rests on an indestructible arch, supported on one side by the Old Testament and on the other by Greek philosophy, each as indispensable as the other. We forget only too readily how much Christianity, in its victory over Greek philosophy, owes to this very philosophy. Christianity could no doubt have achieved the moral and social regeneration of the people without these weapons of the Greek mind; but a religion, especially in the age of the downfall of Greek and Roman philosophy, must have been armed for battle with the best, the most cultured, and the most learned classes of society, and such a battle demanded a knowledge of the weapons which had been forged in the schools of Greek philosophy. We cannot therefore put too high a value on the Fourth Gospel for a knowledge of the intellectual movement of that day. It is true that a religion need not be a philosophy, but it must not owe philosophy any answer. Small as may be the emphasis that we now lay on the Logos doctrine, in that period it was the centre, the vital germ of the whole Christian teaching. If we read any of the writings of Athanasius, or of any of the older church fathers, we shall be surprised to see how all of them begin with the Word (Logos) as a fixed point of departure, and then proceed to prove that the Word is the Son of God, and finally that the Son of God is Jesus of Nazareth. Religious and philosophical are here closely related. If the Christian philosophers gain on the one hand the divinity of the Son of God, on the other hand they retain the rationality of the created universe. That “the ALL is Logos, is Word or Reason,” was at that time as much the battle cry of the prevailing philosophy as the contrary has now become the battle cry of the Darwinians, who seek to explain species, kinds, _i.e._ the Logoi, the divine ideas, as the products not of the originating Mind, but of natural selection, of environment or circumstance, of the survival of the fittest.