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 manner in which it has
been sanctified by its introduction into the Christian scheme. This
uniformity of conception and coincidence of language indicates the
general acquiescence of the human mind in the necessity of some
mediation between the pure spiritual nature of the Deity and the moral
and intellectual nature of man" (as quoted by Lake). And "this