These attributes, abstractly from God himself, were made an object of thought under the name of the Logos. The Logos thus conceived, was necessarily personified or spoken of figuratively as a person. In our own language, in describing its agency,—agency, in its nature personal, and to be ultimately referred to God,—we might indeed avoid attaching a personal character to the Logos considered abstractly from God, by the use of the neuter pronoun _it_. Thus we might say, All things were made by _it_. But the Greek language afforded no such resource, the relative pronoun, in concord with Logos, being necessarily masculine. Thus the Logos or Intellect of God came to be, figuratively or literally, conceived of as an intermediate being between God and his creatures, the great agent in the creation and government of the universe.” * * * “The conception and the name of the Logos were familiar at the time when St. John wrote. They occur in the Apocryphal book of the Wisdom of Solomon. The writer, speaking of the destruction of the first-born of the Egyptians, says (xviii. 15): “‘Thine almighty Logos leapt down from heaven, from his royal throne, a fierce warrior, into the midst of a land of destruction.’” In another passage, likewise, in the prayer ascribed to Solomon, he is represented as thus addressing God (ix. 1, 2): “God of our fathers, and Lord of mercy,  Who hast made all things by thy Logos,  And fashioned man by thy Wisdom. * * * “St. John, writing in Asia Minor, where many, for whom he intended his Gospel, were familiar with the conception of the Logos, has probably, for this reason, adopted the term Logos, in the proem of his Gospel, to express that manifestation of God by Christ, which is elsewhere referred to the spirit of God.”