causes and in the preëxistence of entelechies. But, apart from this unhappy question of existence, which is, as we have said, irrelevant to an ideal, Aristotle's conception of God remains, perhaps, the most philosophical that has yet been constructed. Without any concessions to sentiment or superstition, it presents us with a sublime vision of the essentially human, of a nature as free from an unworthy anthropomorphism as from an inhuman abstractness. It is made both human and superhuman by the same principle of idealization. It is the final cause of Nature and man, the realization of their imminent upward effort, the essence that would contain all their values and escape all their imperfections.

We may well doubt, however, whether men in general will ever be ready to accept so austere a theology in guise of a religion; they were certainly not ready to do so at the end of the classical period. The inheritance of Paganism fell instead to Christianity, in which ethical and naturalistic elements were again united, although united in a new way. For, while the scheme of Paganism, and of all the philosophies that sought to rationalize Paganism, was cosmic and static, the scheme of Christianity was historical. They spoke of the dynamic relations of heaven and earth, or of the immutable hierarchy of ideas and essences; even Aristotle's God was somehow in spatial relations to the Universe which he set in motion. The religion of the Hebrews, on the other hand, had been essentially historical and civic: it had been concerned with the moral destinies of Israel and the dealings of Jehovah with his people. Christianity inherited this historical character; its mysteries occurred in time. Not only the redemption of the world but the vocation and sanctification of the individual were progressive, and when the habits and problems of Christian theology were carried over by the German idealists into the region of pure metaphysics, the systems they conceived were still systems of evolution. God was to be manifest in the development of things. For Christianity in its own way had spoken from the beginning of a gradual and yet to be completed descent of the divine into the natural by the agency of prophecy, law, and sacramental institutions; it had represented the relations of God to man in a vast historic drama, of which creation constituted the opening, the fall and redemption the nexus, and the last judgment the unravelling.

Thus appeared a new scheme for the unification of the natural and the moral. The harmony which the old religion had failed to establish in space and in Nature, the new sought to establish in history and in time. It was hoped that life and 

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