teaches that God is absolute Goodness, and that Goodness has begotten a Son, he furnishes a hint to the same purpose. But we need go no further back than the Logos doctrine of Philo, itself a fair and inevitable deduction from the "Ideas" of Plato, to prove that the Christian Trinity has a Gentile origin; for its whole history is but a history of that Logos doctrine, as it was assumed and amplified by the debates of the Christian Fathers. The doctrine of Trinity was of gradual and slow formation. There was no Trinity in the time of Christ; none in the age of the Apostles; none in the first century; none in the second century; strictly speaking, none in the third century. Justin Martyr is no Trinitarian; no more is Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, or Origen. Tertullian does not teach the doctrine, neither does Lactantius or Cyprian. It was a development, through a long course of controversy, of the old Philonic theme, the Logos; and these controversies were conducted in accordance with the old philosophical methods. The issue made did not lie between the doctrine of Christ and other doctrines that were not of Christ, but between doctrines neither of which were at all identified or associated with Christ, but merely represented antagonistic schools of philosophy. Take the Arian controversy, for instance, which did so much to define the belief of the future church. The dispute here was between two distinct schools of speculative thought, the Western and the Eastern, the Alexandrian or Philonic, and the Persian and rabbinical, the orientalized Platonic and the occidentalized Zoroastrian. According to the former system, which was victorious in the name of Athanasius, the Son, as the divine Logos, existed eternally with God, having an absolute and necessary being independent of God's particular will; only as a distinct person did he have his birth, before the creation, but in time. According to the other system, which Arius supported, and which was defeated, the Son had no absolute, eternal being, and was wholly non-existent until created before the foundation of the world by a special act of the divine will. It is true that the condemned theory was unquestionably heathen, being no other than the ancient emanation theory of the Persians. But the conquering theory was heathen no less, borrowing its lineage directly from Plato; and as defeat does not make Arius a Pagan, victory does not make Athanasius a Christian. The dogma of Trinity is held by men who call themselves disciples of Christ, but it has no

more claim on that account to be considered a Christian dogma, than has the theory of Laplace respecting the genesis of the universe, or the theory of Reichenbach respecting odyllic forces, both of which are held by persons calling themselves Christians.

The philosophical origin of the Trinity is now conceded by multitudes. But the other fundamental doctrines of Christianity may be, even more easily than this one, traced to a Gentile source. The doctrine of the Fall, in passing over to Christianity, was hardly modified in its form, and in substance remained essentially unchanged. Plato teaches that the spirits which, through inability to maintain their pristine state of heavenly purity, were seized with confusion, oblivion, and sloth, fell from heaven, and assuming a mortal form, became men. The mythus is too long to be extracted in full here, but may be found in the "Phædrus." Its analogy with the Christian mythus is very striking. In fact, it is the same thing, only clothed in the historical shape which it borrowed from the Book of Genesis. Let it be granted that Plato ascribes the Fall to the want of spiritual power, to natural inability to rise, or to remain in the sphere of the Absolute, while Christianity ascribes the Fall to an act of wilfulness, by which man tore himself away from God, and exalted his will above the divine will; still, inasmuch as this particular act of wilfulness was due to a disposition, a power or a want of power lying back of each separate determination, the two views do not differ so much as at first they seemed to. Both agree in suggesting that the condition which is natural to man in his present state is not his primeval one; that the cause of the Fall, whatever notion of moral guilt may be attached to it, exists outside of man's temporal consciousness, and precedes the individual volition; that man himself, his true nature alone considered, is different from man as he appears in mortal existence, as different as an angelic being is from an imperfect and guilty one. Granting, too, that according to Plato the Fall is the descent of a pure spirit from heaven to earth, while according to Christianity it is the descent of a man from a state of moral perfection to a state of moral depravity, this circumstance does not in the least affect the similarity of the two ideas; for, not to urge the obvious thought that, in either case, the change is first an inward and then aoutward one, a lapse from a higher to a lower state of spirituality, followed by a lapse from a higher to a lower state of existence,

it must be remembered that the erring Adam was expelled from paradise, where he had been dwelling in perfect innocence, and his paradise bears the same relation to the common earth he afterterwards inhabited sorrowfully that Plato's heaven bore to man's mortal estate. It is doubtful whether Plato's philosophism would ever have been incorporated with Christianity, if his disciple Philo had not accepted it as a theory of man's good and evil, and applied it to the mythical narrative in the Book of Genesis, itself probably a fragment of the old Persian traditions. Philo, evidently possessed by Plato's thought-for he imputes the fall of Adam, not to any moral guilt, but solely to his weakness and imperfection-describes his condition before and after that catastrophe in almost the very words of Christian theologians. He speaks of the earth as a strange country, of mortal life as a pilgrimage through straits and necessities, of death as a return home. The doctrine of the fall is fundamental in Christian theology; without it the "scheme of redemption" would not have been at all what it is. But this doctrine owes its existence to Plato, and to a disciple of Plato who lived at Alexandria, who had never heard of Christ, who was a Jew, but tenfold more a philosopher, who endeavored to sublimate Judaism, and who earned his fame by mediating between the Eastern and Western thought.

The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is as old as human thought and feeling, as human wonder and human aspiration. In all primeval religions we meet with precisely the same belief. The religion of India gives a prominent place to the ten avatars, descents or incorporations of Vishnu, which this guardian god of the world made for the purpose of delivering mankind from physical and moral destruction; from floods, monsters, giants and evil demons, the authors of wickedness and impiety. In the Persian religion we find the legend of Mithras, the creative deity and mediator, standing between the upper and the lower world, and bringing light and mercy to those dwelling in the darkness of the perishable earth. The Osiris of the Egyptian religion corresponds to the Mithras of the Persian: he is a god, beneficent and suffering, a redeemer, dying in his endeavor to redeem. The belief in incarnation penetrating the whole mind of the Orientals, and affording the noblest field for the play of the imagination, gave rise to all those beautiful myths and poems which tell us nearly all we know of the religion of the East.

In the West we find an analogous doctrine in the belief in heroes and hero worship which characterized the religious systems of Greece. The story of Perseus, the god-man, born of Jupiter and Danaë; of Hercules, likewise the offspring of the highest god and a mortal mother, and uniting in himself the human attributes and the divine, gifted with supernatural power, and representing the ideal of virtue in that primeval time, laboring for the welfare and salvation of men, destroying monsters in human and in beastly shape, the enemy of evil, the foe of tyrants, the conqueror of death itself, descending at last into the underworld, and returning thence unharmed, thus breaking the might of the grave; the variously told story of Dionysius derives its significance from the belief in incarnations. All these myths were of Oriental origin, and changed their character somewhat when adopted by the Grecian mind. There is a marked difference between the incarnation theory of the East and that of the West, a difference sufficiently well expressed by saying that in the East the gods became men, in the West the men became gods; in the East the divine element predominated over the human, in the West the human predominated over the divine. The glories of the Oriental religion did not allow the mingling of the spiritual with the fleshly; the immortal, therefore, only appeared in a human shape. They were not men, but they seemed to be men. They had no animal qualities, no earthly body, no passions, no infirmities. Djenschid was one of the most glorious of the lords of light who ever came to the globe; but there was no blending of the celestial and the terrestrial in his person. Mithras was pure god with only the semblance of humanity. Vishnu is said to have been born of a virgin, and may be supposed therefore to have assumed in part the attributes of man; but in his case the union of the two elements is indistinct, abnormal and grotesque, and the immortal part remains almost as much by itself as if the mortal was not attached. The Greek heroes, on the other hand, were solid men, made of flesh and blood. Their human part was no mere shadow of their divinity, did not vanish and become as nought in the overpowering splendor of the Godhead, but asserted itself as of kin with the Godhead. They rose to be gods not by meditation and longing, but by action, awakening and developing the deity that dwelt and wrought within them. They exhibited a self-sacrificing love for country and their kind, a patient and united courage in the performance of

duty, a holy obedience to the commands of the Eternal. They illustrated God. They were inspired, being so completely human; their mediation was the more perfect, for they could sympathize with men, bear their burdens, understand their temptations, exemplify righteousness to them so that they could imitate it, be to them, in one word, deities on earth.

At first view, the Christian doctrine of Incarnation seems to differ from both of these equally. The union of the two natures in Christ is not represented or paralleled either in Vishnu or in Hercules. The difference, however, is formal, not material, and an examination leads to the conviction that the Christian doctrine grew out of neither of these separately, but out of them both combined. Here, again, Christian theology has mediated between the Eastern and the Western thought. It is undeniable that the orthodox doctrine respecting the person of Jesus was the result of controversy between the Oriental and the Occidental systems; between those who laid stress upon the divinity and those who emphasized the humanity of Christ. One party contended that Jesus had a mortal body, in all respects like that of other men. Another party maintained that his body was not made of mortal stuff; that it was a "spiritual" body, insensible to pain, requiring no nourishment. This was the Persian theory, and was accepted by Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, authorities in the church. The doctors disputed about the soul of Jesus, as they did about his body. The Alexandrian Fathers were Orientals, contending that the Logos took the place of the rational and spiritual nature in Christ. Tertullian was an Occidental, holding that the soul of Christ was like that of other men. The semi-Arians again accepted the Persian view. All agreed that Christ was sinless. In the controversies respecting the mode in which this union of two natures in one person was effected, the influence of these two types of speculation is very clearly discernable. Were the two elements commingled, and how? Was the personality a human personality made divine by moral obedience, or was a divine one made human by condescension? It is useless to enter into these discussions here. Enough that at the bottom of them all lay this antagonism, if we may give it so harsh a name, between the religious theories of Greece and Persia, and that the church was satisfied when it had done its best to combine the two.

The belief in an Immaculate Conception is a necessary consequent