the centre,
the vital germ of the whole Christian teaching. If we read any of the
writings of Athanasius, or of any of the older church fathers, we shall be
surprised to see how all of them begin with the Word (Logos) as a fixed
point of departure, and then proceed to prove that the Word is the Son of
God, and finally that the Son of God is Jesus of Nazareth. Religious and
philosophical are here closely related. If the Christian philosophers gain
on the one hand the divinity of the Son of God, on the other hand they
retain the rationality of the created universe. That "the ALL is Logos, is
Word or Reason," was at that time as much the battle cry of the prevailing
philosophy as the contrary has now become the battle cry of the
Darwinians, who seek to explain species, kinds, _i.e._ the Logoi, the
divine ideas, as the products not of the originating Mind, but of natural
selection, of environment or circumstance, of the survival of the fittest.
And what is the fittest, if not the rational, the Platonic "Good," that
is, the Logos? Why, then, turn back to the stone age of human thinking,
why again turn nature into wood, when for thousands of years Greek
philosophers and Christian thinkers have recognised her as something
spiritual, as a world of eternal ideas? How would such men as Herder,
Schelling, and Hegel have smiled at such a view of the world! Yes, Darwin
himself would be ashamed of his followers, for he saw, though not always
clearly, that everything in this sphere presupposes something beyond, and
in the loftiest utterance of his book he demanded an origin, yes, an
originator. In the writings of the philosophical church fathers we
constantly hear more of the Logos which was in the beginning, and through
which all things were made, than of God, who in the beginning created
heaven and earth.

And in this lies the great interest of the lost treatise of Celsus. Had he
been an Epicurean, as Origen supposed, he would have had no personal
interest in the Logos. But this Logos had become at that time to such an
extent the common property of Greek philosophy, that the Jew, under whose
mask Celsus at the outset attacked the Christians, could quite naturally
express his willingness to acknowledge the Logos as the Son of God.
Origen, it is true, says that the Jew has here forgotten his part, for he
had himself known many Jewish scholars, no one of whom would have
acknowledged such an idea. This shows that Origen did not know the