as not only unwearied, but also unselfish. There have been few
Fathers of the Church whose life-story leaves such an impression of
purity behind it as that of Origen. The atmosphere which he breathed as
a Christian and as a philosopher was dangerous; but his mind remained
sound, and even his feeling for truth scarcely ever forsook him.[681] To
us his theory of the world, surveyed in its details, presents various
changing hues, like that of Philo, and at the present day we can
scarcely any longer understand how he was able to unite the different
materials; but, considering the solidity of his character and the
confidence of his decisions, we cannot doubt that he himself felt the
agreement of all essential parts of his system. No doubt he spoke in one
way to the perfect and in another to the mass of Christian people. The
narrow-minded or the immature will at all times necessarily consider
such proceedings hypocrisy, but the outcome of his religious and
scientific conception of the world required the twofold language.
Orthodox theology of all creeds has never yet advanced beyond the circle
first mapped out by his mind. She has suspected and corrected her
founder, she has thought she could lop off his heterodox opinions as if
they were accidental excrescences, she has incorporated with the simple
faith itself the measure of speculation she was obliged to admit, and
continued to give the rule of faith a more philosophic form, fragment by
fragment, in order that she might thus be able to remove the gap between
Faith and Gnosis and to banish free theology through the formula of
ecclesiastical dogma. But it may reasonably be questioned whether all
this is progress, and it is well worth investigating whether the gap
between half theological, clerical Christianity and a lay Christianity
held in tutelage is more endurable than that between Gnosis and Pistis,
which Origen preserved and bridged over.

The Christian system of Origen[682] is worked out in opposition to the
systems of the Greek philosophers and of the Christian Gnostics. It is
moreover opposed to the ecclesiastical enemies of science, the Christian
Unitarians, and the Jews.[683] But the science of the faith, as
developed by Origen, being built up with the appliances of Philo's
science, bears unmistakable marks of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Origen
speculated not only in the manner of Justin, but also in that of
Valentinus and therefore likewise after the fashion of Plo