Christ also frequently represents His works as wrought by the Father, as for instance when he says:—‘I do nothing of myself; but as the Father hath taught me, I speak these things.’[24] In fine, the whole genius of Christianity would appear to point towards a total submission of Christ in every respect to all the laws of the universe: for these, indeed, as we shall soon have occasion to show, form but another expression for the will of God acting in conformity with His character. To make our meaning clear, we may say that the will of man is accomplished in conformity with the laws of the universe, while on the other hand the will of God, as above defined, constitutes in itself the laws of the universe. Now it appears to us from what we find contained in the books of the Christian religion, that Christ must in this sense be regarded as similar to man; but, inasmuch as the relation of Christ to the universe is there asserted to have been different from that of any mere man, so the works of Christ are to be regarded as different from those which any mere man can accomplish. 37. The Christian system, of which we have thus briefly described the peculiarities, was soon called upon to do battle, on the one hand with the antient philosophies of Greece and Rome, and on the other with the semi-savage creeds of those less civilised races of man which were destined ultimately to overpower the Roman Empire. But it was chiefly when the apostolic pioneers came into contact with the acute minds of the antient philosophers that we have light struck regarding what may be termed the philosophical system of Christianity; thus we have already remarked (Art. 32), that the nature of the glorified body is most clearly indicated to us by the Apostle Paul. As respects the more barbarous nations which afterwards embraced Christianity, _they_ were not likely to puzzle themselves about the physical possibilities of a future state, nor even to contest the reality of a place of eternal physical torment. And so it happened that, when dealing with a lower class of converts, some prominent Christians in post-apostolic periods appealed more to their fears than to their hopes, bringing vividly before them awful ideas of the nature of hell; while on the other hand, the higher class of converts, if they had not a very clear idea of heaven, were yet drawn with intense longing to a future which they were to spend in the company of Christ.