a book, a name which he might use as a philosophic symbol or plaything, we might set a higher value upon the Philonic or other explanations which are sometimes offered of the Christology of the Epistle to the Colossians; but when we consider what Christ really was to the apostle, such explanations become meaningless. Paul was not a philosopher like Philo, baffled by the difficulty of connecting the spiritual God and the material universe, and finding the solution of his ever-recurring problem in the idea of the Logos, an idea which in some unexplained, not to say incomprehensible, way he was led to identify with Christ. The relation of God to the world had no more difficulty for him than for Amos or Isaiah; the God in whom he believed was not the philosophical abstraction of Philo, but the living God of the Bible, who made the world and who acted in it as He pleased. Paul did not transfer to Christ the attributes of the Logos, he did not make Him divine or halfdivine, that he might provide an answer to speculative difficulties about the relation of God to the world of matter. The process in his mind was the very reverse. He was conscious in his experience as a Christian that what he came in contact with in Christ was nothing less than the eternal truth and love of God; it was the very reality which God is, the revelation of His eternal being in a human person, the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 29). It does not matter whether 'bodily' means 'incarnate as man,' or 'in organic unity and completeness' as opposed to partial or imperfect revelation. The point is that Paul was conscious of meeting God in Christ. Here, he felt, he touched the last reality in the universe, the ens realissimum, the ultimate truth through which and by relation to which all things must be defined and understood. Paul does not, in writing to the Colossians, invest Christ in a character and greatness which
