e it [my life] again; this commandment have I
received of my Father" (x. 18).

"My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all" (x. 29).

"I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in His love" (xv.
10).

I have read Justin carefully for the purpose of marking every expression
in his writings bearing upon the relations of the Son to the Father, and
I find none so strongly expressing subordination as these, and the
declarations of this kind in the works of Justin are nothing like so
numerous as they are in the short Gospel of St. John.

The reader who knows anything about the history of Christian doctrine
will see at a glance how impossible it would have been for a Gospel
ascribing these expressions to Jesus to have been received by the
Christian Church long before Justin's time, except that Gospel had been
fully authenticated as the work of the last surviving Apostle.

SECTION XVII.

JUSTIN AND PHILO.

The writer of "Supernatural Religion" asserts that Justin derived his
Logos doctrine from Philo, and also that his doctrine was identical with
that of Philo and opposed to that of St. John.

But respecting this assertion two questions may be asked.

From whom did Philo derive _his_ doctrine of the Logos? and

From whom did Justin derive his identification of the Logos with Jesus?

The Christian, all whose conceptions of salvation rest ultimately upon
the truth that "The Word was God," believes (if, that is, he has any
knowledge of the history of human thought), that God prepared men for
the reception of so momentous a truth long before that truth was fully
revealed. He believes that God prepared the Gentiles for the reception
of this truth by familiarizing them with some idea of the Logos through
the speculations of Plato; and he also believes that God prepared His
chosen people for receiving the same truth by such means as the
personification of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs, and in the Apocryphal
moral books, and, above all, by the identification of the active
presence and power of God with the Meymera or Word, as set forth in the
Chaldee paraphrases.

Both these lines of thought seem to have coalesced and to have reached
their full development (so far as they could, at least, apart from
Christianity) in Alexandrian Judaism, which is principally known to us
in the pages of Philo; but how much of Philo's own speculation is
contained in the extracts from his writings given