be and have humbled themselves for like him.’—­1 John iii. 2. their past errors, acknowledging and confessing their ’As we have born the image of the sins, such persons shall find earthy, we shall also bear the image pardon from the Saviour and of the heavenly.’—­1 Cor. xv. 49. merciful God, and receive a most choice and great advantage ’For if we have been planted of being like the Logos together in the likeness of his of God, who was originally death, we shall be also in the the great archetype after likeness of his resurrection.’—­ which the soul of man was Rom. vi. 5. formed.’—­De Execrationibus.

Here, then, we get, complete, the idea of Christ as the Word of God, and we see that Christianity is as lacking in originality on these points as in everything else.  We may note, also, that this Platonic idea was current among the Jews before Philo, although he gives it to us more thoroughly and fully worked out:  in the apocryphal books of the Jews we find the idea of the Logos in many passages in Wisdom, to take but a single case.

The widely-spread existence of this notion is acknowledged by Dean Milman in his “History of Christianity.”  He says:  “This Being was more or less distinctly impersonated, according to the more popular or more philosophic, the more material or the more abstract, notions of the age or people.  This was the doctrine from the Ganges, or even the shores of the Yellow Sea to the Ilissus; it was the fundamental principle of the Indian religion and the Indian philosophy; it was the basis of Zoroastrianism; it was pure Platonism; it was the Platonic Judaism of the Alexandrian school.  Many fine passages might be quoted from Philo, on the impossibility that the first self-existing Being should become cognisable to the sense of man; and even in Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist and our Lord himself spoke no new doctrine, but rather the common sentiment of the more enlightened, when they declared that ’no man had seen God at any time.’  In conformity with this principle, the Jews, in the interpretation of the older Scriptures, instead of direct and sensible communication from the one great Deity, had interposed either one or more intermediate beings as the channels of communication.  According to one accredited tradition alluded to by St. Stephen, the law was delivered by the ‘disposition of angels;’ according to another, this office was delegated to a single angel, sometimes called the angel of the Law (see Gal. iii. 19); at others, the Metatron.  But the more ordinary representative, as it were, of God, to the sense and mind of man, was the Memra, or the Divine Word; and it is remarkable that the same appellation is found in the Indian, the Persian, the Platonic, and the Alexandrian systems.  By the Targumists, the earliest Jewish commentators on the Scriptures, this term had been already applied to the Messiah; nor is it necessary to observe the