idea of the good--_i.e._, of the advantageous, profitable, and
beneficial--is the highest concept of the whole dialectic, that in
reference to which all other ideas have place and significance. If we
ventured to extend the interpretation of the passage, retaining its
spirit, into fields where we have more knowledge than Plato could have,
we might say that the principle of the good generates essence and
existence, in the sense that all natural organs have functions and
utilities by which they establish themselves in the world, and that the
system of these useful functions is the true essence or idea of any
living thing. But the Socratic origin and sense of such a passage as
this, and of others (in the Timaeus, for instance) allied to it, was soon
lost in the headlong idolatry which took possession of the neo-Platonic
school; and it was through this medium that Saint Augustine received his
Platonic inspiration. The good no longer meant, as it did to Plato, the
principle of benefit everywhere, but it meant the good Being; and this,
for a Christian, could naturally be none other than God; so that the
idea that the good was the creator of all essence and existence now
assumed a marvellously Mosaic significance. Here was one of those bits
of primeval revelation which, it was explained, had survived in the
heathen world. The hypostasis of moral conceptions, then, and of the
idea of the good in particular, led up from the Platonic side to the
doctrine of creation.

[Sidenote: Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.]

The history of the conception among the Jews was entirely different, the
element of goodness in the creator being there adventitious and the
element of power original. Jehovah for Job was a universal force,
justified primarily by his omnipotence; but this physical authority
would in the end, he hoped, be partly rationalised and made to clash
less scandalously with the authority of justice. Among the Greeks, as
was to be expected, the idea of justice was more independent and
entire; but once named and enshrined, that divinity, too, tended to
absoluteness, and could be confused with the physical basis of
existence. In the Stoic philosophy the latter actually gained the upper
hand, and the problem of Job reappeared on the horizon. It did not rise
into painful prominence, however, until Christian times, when absolute
moral perfection and absolute physical efficacy were predicated of God
with equal emphasis, if not a