MODIFICATIONS IN THE IDEA OP GOD, ETC. 55 



theological abstraction. He denies that He is either " the 

 One, or the Good, or Mind, or Being in itself, or Father, 

 or God, or Creator, or Lord," None of these terms by itself 

 will describe His perfections. The world-ruler is, in fact, 

 the sum of them all.* Elsewhere he speaks of God as the 

 Source of all existence.f And he points out that the 

 conceptions of God entertained by the Greek philosophers 

 were unsatisfactory.! 



I do not propose to take up your time with a history of the 

 idea of God in the early Greek Fathers. It must, I think, 

 be confessed to have oscillated between the teaching of 

 Scripture and that of the philosophers. I have found here 

 no more evidence of the systematization of vague impressions 

 on points of Christian doctrine than on other theological 

 questions, the Person of the Son alone excepted. Very often 

 God is looked upon as a transcendent Being, outside things 

 created. But there is a magnificent passage in Athanasius§ 

 which speaks of God as the Force behind all created things, 

 and recalls the equally majestic language of St. Paul, 

 where he speaks of the Son as the image of the invisible 

 God, the Creator of all things, whose all-pervading influence 

 holds them all together .j] In other words, God was looked 

 upon as both transcendent and immanent ; as dAvelliug in the 

 visible universe and yet extending beyond it. Thus two 

 tendencies of thought which have been regarded as incom- 

 patible were wisely and reverently combined. 



It has been a misfortune for Westei-n thought that it has 

 been so largely dependent on the Vulgate — a very inade- 

 quate vehicle, as most of us are aware, for the expression of 

 Greek or Hebrew ideas. Another drawback has been the 

 inheritance by Western theologians of the Roman idea of 

 God as a Potentate — a just and beneficent Potentate, no doubt, 

 but still a Potentate, and little more. In the earliest Latin 

 Fathers the Greek idea of immanence struggled with that of 

 a just and wise Ruler who dwelt outside phenomena and 

 governed them according to the counsel of His will. These 

 two opposite tendencies are very strongly marked in the 

 writings of Augustine. Unfortunately for us in the West. 

 the Latin tendencies of that epoch-making Father ultimately 

 prevailed among races brought under the influence of Latin 



* Strom., V, 12. t Jbid., vii, 1. J Ibid., vi. 



§ Contra Gentes, 41-44. The whole passage is most striking. 

 II Col. i, 17. 



