Logos, by which, as by an assumed instrument, he
made the world. As God is the original of the image here called
shadow, so this image becomes the original of other things."7 "The
intelligible world, or world of archetypal ideas, is the Logos of
the world creating God; as an intelligible or ideal city is the
thought of the architect reflecting to build a sensible city."8
"Of the world, God is the cause by which, the four elements the
material from which, the Logos the instrument through which, the
goodness of the Creator the end for which, it was made."9 These
citations from Philo clearly show, in various stages of
development, that doctrine of the Logos which began first arguing
to the Divine Being from human analogies with separating the
conception of a plan in the mind of God from its execution in
fact; proceeded with personifying that plan, or sum of ideas, as a
mediating agent between motive and action, between impulse and
fulfilment; and ended with hypostatizing the arranging power of
the Divine thought as a separate being, his intellectual image or
Son, his first and perfect production. They unequivocally express
these thoughts: that God is the only being who was from eternity;
that the Logos was the first begotten, antemundane being, that he
was the likeness, image, immediate manifestation, of the Father;
that he was the medium of creation, the instrumental means in the
outward formation of the world. History shows us this doctrine
unfolded by minute steps, which it would be tedious to follow,
from the Book of Proverbs to Philo Judaus and John, from Plato to
Justin Martyr and Athanasius. But the rapid sketch just presented
may be sufficient now.

When it is written, "and the Logos was God," the meaning is not
strictly literal. To guard against its being so considered, the
author tautologically repeats what he had said immediately before,
"the same was in the beginning with God." Upon the supposition
that the Logos is strictly identical with God, the verses make
utter nonsense. "In the beginning was God, and God was with God,
and God was God. God was in the beginning with God." But suppose
the Logos to mean an ante mundane but subordinate being, who was a
perfect image or likeness of God, and the sense is both clear and
satisfactory, and no violence is done either to historical data or
to grammatical demands. "And the Logos was God," that is, was the
mirror or facsimile of God. So, employing the same idiom, we