are
accustomed to say

2 Mangey's edition of Philo, vol. i. p. 82.

3 Ibid. p. 308.

4 Ibid. p. 121.

5 Ibid. p. 560.

6 Ibid. p. 277.

7 Ibid. p. 106.

8 Ibid. p. 5.

9 Ibid. p. 162.

of an accurate representation of a person, It is the very man
himself! Or, without the use of this idiom, we may explain the
expression "the Logos was God" thus: He stands in the place of God
to the lower creation: practically considered, he is as God to us.
As Philo writes, "To the wise and perfect the Most High is God;
but to us, imperfect beings, the Logos God's interpreter is
God."10

The inward significance of the Logos doctrine, in all its degrees
and phases, circumstantially and essentially, from first to last,
is the revelation of God. God himself, in himself, is conceived as
absolutely withdrawn beyond the apprehension of men, in boundless
immensity and inaccessible secrecy. His own nature is hidden, as a
thought is hidden in the mind; but he has the power of revealing
it, as a thought is revealed by speaking it in a word. That
uttered word is the Logos, and is afterwards conceived as a
person, and as creative, then as building and glorifying the
world. All of God that is sent forth from passive concealment into
active manifestation is the Logos. "The term Logos comprehends,"
Norton says, "all the attributes of God manifested in the creation
and government of the universe." The Logos is the hypostasis of
"the unfolded portion," "the revealing power," "the self showing
faculty," "the manifesting action," of God. The essential idea,
then, concerning the Logos is that he is the means through which
the hidden God comes to the cognizance of his creatures. In
harmony with this prevailing philosophy one who believed the Logos
to have been incarnated in Christ would suppose the purpose of his
incarnation to be the fuller revelation of God to men. And
Martineau says, "The view of revelation which is implicated in the
folds of the Logos doctrine that everywhere pervades the fourth
Gospel, is that it is the appearance to beings who have something
of a divine spirit within them, of a yet diviner without them,
leading them to the divinest of all, who embraces them both." This
is a fine statement of the practical religious aspect of John's
conception of the nature and office of the Savior.

Since he regarded God as personal love, life, truth, and light,
and Christ, the embodied Logos, as his only begotten Son, an exact
i