are there
who strive after unity and completeness in their theory of the world?
Above all, however, there was something else that necessarily vanished,
as soon as people meddled with the individual propositions, and enlarged
or abridged them. We mean the frame of mind which produced them, that
wonderful unity between the relative view of things and the absolute
estimate of the highest good attainable by the free spirit that is
certain of its God. But a time came, nay, had already come, when a sense
of proportion and relation was no longer to be found.

In the East the history of dogma and of the Church during the succeeding
centuries is the history of Origen's philosophy. Arians and orthodox,
critics and mystics, priests who overcame the world and monks who
shunned it but were eager for knowledge[815] could appeal to this system
and did not fail to do so. But, in the main problem that Origen set for
the Church in this religious philosophy of his, we find a recurrence of
that propounded by the so-called Gnosticism two generations earlier. He
solved it by producing a system which reconciled the faith of the Church
with Greek philosophy; and he dealt Gnosticism its death-blow. This
solution, however, was by no means intended as the doctrine of the
Church, since indeed it was rather based on the distinction between
Church belief and theology, and consequently on the distinction between
the common man and the theologian. But such a distinction was not
permanently tenable in a Church that had to preserve its strength by the
unity and finality of a revealed faith, and no longer tolerated fresh
changes in the interpretation of its possession. Hence a further
compromise was necessary. The Greek philosophy, or speculation, did not
attain real and permanent recognition within the Church till a new
accommodation, capable of being accounted both Pistis and Gnosis, was
found between what Origen looked on as Church belief and what he
regarded as Gnosis. In the endeavours of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and
Hippolytus were already found hesitating, nay, we may almost say naive,
attempts at such an accommodation; but ecclesiastical traditionalism was
unable to attain complete clearness as to its own position till it was
confronted with a philosophy of religion that was no longer heathen or
Gnostic, but had an ecclesiastical colouring.

But, with this prospect, we have already crossed the border of the third
century. At its beginning there we