MEANING AND HISTORY OF THE LOGOS OF PHILOSOPHY. 265 
opened the eyes of His faithful adherents to the meaning of 
His transient apparition in this visible world, they became 
fully conscious that the life they now realised in their 
magnificent hopes,—a life incomparably more exalted than that 
of flesh and blood,—had been imparted to them by the self- 
sacrificing Love which had revealed itself through Him, and 
was the fundamental principle of His unique authority over 
all flesh. Had they not, then, sufficing reason for the belief 
that they owed to it also their lower and provisional life,—that, 
in short, this same self-sacrificing Love is the Author of life in 
its several grades and stages, and of the manifold conditions of 
its manifestation,—is the Energy whereby the universe was 
originated, and has been, and ever will be, governed and 
preserved? This was their firm belief; and, as will easily 
appear, if the facts which warrant it are once admitted, they 
reached it by a route much more direct than any upon which 
philosophers had ever lighted in their endeavours to arrive at 
stable conclusions: it was involved in their intuition of the 
essential attributes of Him in whom they perceived the Life ; 
they came to it, or rather it came to them, by revelation. 
A revelation, however, which, as this did, quickly spreads, 
and a spiritual power which brings beneath its sway, as time 
goes on, innumerable varieties of intellect and culture, must 
soon invade the realms of philosophic thought, and there 
effect at length a world-wide revolution. Near the end of the 
first century, if not before, the inevitable invasion com- 
menced, and its progress from that time to this has been 
a continued illustration of the well-known Scripture say- 
ing, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and 
the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor. i. 25, R.V.). 
In the appointment of a visible leader of the expedition 
the Divine choice fell upon a man who had been prepared 
for the task by no dialectical training and no literary 
culture: his special qualification was the soul of a philo- 
sopher, but this he possessed in a superlative degree. In 
the original band of select disciples there was one whose 
habit and tone of mind were such as rendered him, above the 
rest, susceptible of sympathetic touch with the unfathomable 
thoughts and boundless purposes of the mysterious Teacher ; 
in which respect, perhaps, though not in others, he may be 
likened to the Apostle who was “ born out of due time.” For 
the specific work in question, however, the chosen instrument 
was the disciple whom Jesus loved, the Apostle John, in 
whose writings we find statements virtually challenging for 
