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 "For all things, O God, do I praise and bless and glorify thee, together with the eternal and heavenly Jesus Christ, thy well-beloved Son, with whom to thee and the Holy Ghost be glory both now and forever." This prayer, whether authentic or not, is an example of the theology of the Church as it began to shape itself in the ﬁrst Christian centuries.

When the Greek philosophic mind took up the new teaching it was already accustomed to the doctrine of the Logos as a lower expression of God, as an emanation of God below the plane of the Inﬁnite One, and yet incomparably above men—an intermediary between them. And the whole heathen world was adjusted to the idea of a still lower manifestation of God, which was that of God expressing Himself temporarily in the human form. The prevalence of these two general ideas made it easy for the world to accept the new and rather vague teaching of the deity of Jesus. Neither the philosophic classes nor the unreasoning masses found it necessary to make any sharp mental readjustment; the new teaching fitted in with their previous education in such matters; they needed only to think of the man Jesus as either the Logos or God