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 or "This statement, while professing merely to predicate existence, assumes the attribute of speech," and they grew aware of the inaccessibility and illogicality of their national God. The result was a series of attempts on their part to explain and recommend Jehovah to the Greeks—culminating in the great system of Philo, who, by the doctrine of the Mediating Logos, ensured that the deity should be at the same time accessible and inaccessible: "The Logos," he writes, "dwells on the margin between the Created and the Increate, and delights to serve them both." And there, for a little, the matter rested.

But in Philo's own lifetime a second assertion had been made among the Judasan hills. We do not know its original form—too many minds have worked over it since—but we know that it was unphilosophic and anti-social. For it was addressed to the uneducated and it promised them a kingdom. Following the usual route, it reached Alexandria, where the same fate overtook it: it had to face comments, and in so doing was transformed. It too evolved a system which, though not logical, paid the lip service to logic that a great city demands, and interspersed bridges of argument among the flights of faith. All Greek thinkers, except Socrates, had done the same, so that, on its intellectual side, the new religion did not break with the past; it consisted of an assertion in a philosophic dress, and Clement of Alexandria, its first theologian, used methods that were familiar to Philo two hundred years before. Not only did he bring allegory to bear upon the more intractable passages of Scripture, but he adapted the Philonian Logos and identified