e fundamental religious conceptions.

The Semitic peoples were essentially theocratic in their religion; they
used the forms of the sensuous imagination in setting forth the
realities of the unseen world. They were not given to metaphysical
speculation, nor long insistent in their inquiries as to the meaning and
origin of things. With the Greeks it was far otherwise. For them ideas
and not images set forth fundamental reality, and their restless
intellectual activity would be content with nothing else than the
ultimate truth. Their speculation as to the nature of God had led them
gradually to separate him by an infinite distance from all creation, and
to feel keenly the opposition of the finite and the infinite, the
perfect and the imperfect, the eternal and the temporal. To them,
therefore, Christianity presented itself not primarily as the religion
of a redemption through the indwelling power of a risen saviour, as with
Paul, nor even as the solution of the problem how the sins of men could
be forgiven, but as the reconciliation of the antinomy of the intellect,
indicated above. The incarnation became the great truth: God is no
longer separated by a measureless distance from the human race, but by
his entering into humanity he redeems it and makes possible its ultimate
unity with himself. Such lines of thought provoke discussion as to the
relationship of Jesus to God the Father, and, at a later period, of the
nature of the Holy Spirit who enters into and transforms believers.

Greek philosophy in the second century A.D. had sunk for the most part
into scepticism and impotence; its original impulse had been lost, and
no new intellectual power took its place; only in Alexandria was there a
genuine effort made to solve the fundamental problems of God and the
world. Plato had made God accessible to the highest knowledge as the
transcendent idea, remote from the world. For Aristotle, too, God in his
essence is far above the world and at most its first mover. The stoics,
on the other hand, taught his immanence, while the eclectics sought
truth by the mingling of the two ideas. They accomplished their purpose
in various ways, by distinguishing between God and his power--or by the
notion of a hierarchy of super-sensible beings, or in a doctrine which
taught that the operations of nature are the movement of pure spirit; or
by the use of the "Word" of "Wisdom," half personified as intermediate
between God and the world. While t