is address to the Athenians. He begins
by saying that the observations he had made enabled him to bear witness
that the Athenians were indeed, in every respect, "a God-fearing
people;"--that the God whom they knew so imperfectly as to designate Him
"the Unknown," but whom "they worshipped," was the God he worshipped,
and would now more fully declare to them. He assures them that their
past history, and their present geographical position, had been the
object of Divine foreknowledge and determination. "He hath determined
beforehand the times of each nation's existence, and fixed the
geographical boundaries of their habitation," all with this specific
design, that they might "seek after," "feel after," and "find the Lord,"
who had never been far from any one of them. He admits that their
poet-philosophers had risen to a lofty apprehension of "the Fatherhood
of God," for they had taught that "we are all his offspring;" and he
seems to have felt that in asserting the common brotherhood of our race,
he would strike a chord of sympathy in the loftiest school of Gentile
philosophy. He thus "recognized the Spirit of God brooding over the face
of heathenism, and fructifying the spiritual element in the heart even
of the natural man. He feels that in these human principles there were
some faint adumbrations of the divine, and he looked for their firmer
delineation to the figure of that gracious Master, higher and holier
than man, whom he contemplated in his own imagination, and whom he was
about to present to them."[860]

[Footnote 860: Merivale's "Conversion of the Roman Empire," p. 78.]

This function of ancient philosophy is distinctly recognized by many of
the greatest of the Fathers, as Justin, Clement, Origen, Augustine, and
Theodoret. Justin Martyr believed that a ray of the Divine Logos shone
on the mind of the heathen, and that the human soul instinctively turned
towards God as the plant turns towards the sun. "Every race of men
participated in the Word. And they who lived with the Word were
Christians, even if they were held to be godless; as, for example, among
the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and those like them."[861] Clement
taught that "philosophy, before the coming of the Lord, was necessary to
the Greeks for righteousness; and now it proved useful for godliness,
being a sort of preliminary discipline for those who reap the fruits of
faith through demonstration.... Perhaps we may say that it was given to
the