that are
found in the Old Testament are of great interest, in so far as they make
the later amalgamation of Semitic and Aryan ideas historically more
intelligible, and also in so far as--like the correspondences to be found
among the East Indians and even the red Indians(28)--they confirm the truth
or at least the innate human character of a Logos doctrine. But wherever
we encounter the word Logos outside of Greece, it is, and remains, a
foreign word, a Hellenic thought.

Jewish philosophers, while they adopted the word, only filled their old
skins with new wine, with the natural consequence that the wine burst the
old skins; but without spilling. For it was this which, in the hands of
such men as the writer of the Fourth Gospel, as Hippolytus, Clement,
Origen, and the best of the church fathers, gave them the strength and
enthusiasm to triumph over the world, and especially over the strongholds
of heathen religion, and even over Greek philosophy. Had the Fourth
Evangelist wished to say that Christ was the divine Sophia or the
Shekinah, or, as in Job, Wisdom as the fear of God, would he have said,
"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos became flesh, and lived
among us, and we saw his glory, a glory as of the only begotten Son of the
Father, full of grace and truth?" Why not take the facts just as they are,
and why wish to improve that which requires no human improvement? The
Christian doctrine is and remains what it is; it rests on an
indestructible arch, supported on one side by the Old Testament and on the
other by Greek philosophy, each as indispensable as the other. We forget
only too readily how much Christianity, in its victory over Greek
philosophy, owes to this very philosophy. Christianity could no doubt have
achieved the moral and social regeneration of the people without these
weapons of the Greek mind; but a religion, especially in the age of the
downfall of Greek and Roman philosophy, must have been armed for battle
with the best, the most cultured, and the most learned classes of society,
and such a battle demanded a knowledge of the weapons which had been
forged in the schools of Greek philosophy. We cannot therefore put too
high a value on the Fourth Gospel for a knowledge of the intellectual
movement of that day. It is true that a religion need not be a philosophy,
but it must not owe philosophy any answer. Small as may be the emphasis
that we now lay on the Logos doctrine, in that period it was