his predecessors, being assured that even when he borrowed from others he made each interpretation thoroughly his own, and that his knowledge of the Scriptures was thorough and independent. He does not give Athanasius high credit for ascribing the human predicates (attributes) of Christ to the body (against the Arians who based their denial of his deity on the theory that the Logos constituted the entire rational nature of Christ), and yet insisting that the subject of these predicates

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... es) is nevertheless the Logos (in opposition to the Antiochians). He seems really not to have had a satisfactory theory of the relation of the divine and the human in the person of Christ and to have fallen back on simple faith: in his God he has his Redeemer, wherefore also he has in his Redeemer his God. He had no satisfactory theory of the unity of the divine and the human in a single personality, although he insisted on this unity in opposition to the Antiochians, and he scarcely rose above a mere "community of predicates" (attributes). It is our author's opinion that the great Alexandrian fell into a multitude of contradictions, and in this he is doubtless correct. His chief merit was to strike out a via media between Arianism and Antiochianism, and to prepare the way for the more penetrating and consistent teachers of the later time. While he cannot properly be charged with monophysitism, he was far more a forerunner of this form of thought than of the Chalcedonian Christology. Of course it would be unreasonable to expect to find in Athanasius the fully developed Christology of the following time.