hrough the dim and
distorting medium of more than two centuries. Surely no one imagines
these few sentences contain and sum up the results of a lifetime of
earnest thought, or represent all the opinions and beliefs of the
earliest philosophers! And should we find therein no recognition of a
personal God, would it not be most unfair and illogical to assert that
they were utterly ignorant of a God, or wickedly denied his being? If
they say "there is no God," then they are foolish Atheists; if they are
silent on that subject, we have a right to assume they were Theists, for
it is most natural to believe in God. And yet it has been quite
customary for Christian teachers, after the manner of some Patristic
writers, to deny to those early sages the smallest glimpse of underived
and independent knowledge of a Divine Being, in their zeal to assert for
the Sacred Scriptures the exclusive prerogative of revealing Him.

Now in regard to the theological opinions of the Greek philosophers, we
shall venture this general _lemma_--_the majority of them recognized an
"incorporeal substance"_[394]_ an uncreated Intelligence, an ordering,
governing Mind_. Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, who were
Materialists, are perhaps the only exceptions. Many of them were
Pantheists, in the higher form of Pantheism, which, though it associates
the universe with its framer and mover, still makes "the moving
principle" superior to that which is moved. The world was a living
organism,

"Whose body nature is, and God the soul."

Unquestionably most on them recognized the existence of _two_ first
principles, substances essentially distinct, which had co-existed from
eternity--an incorporeal Deity and matter.[395] We grant that the free
production of a universe by a creative fiat--the calling of matter into
being by a simple act of omnipotence--is not elementary to human reason.
The famous physical axiom of antiquity, "_De nihilo nihil, in nihilum
posse reverti"_ under one aspect, may be regarded as the expression of
the universal consciousness of a mental inability to conceive a creation
out of nothing, or an annihilation.[396] "We can not conceive, either,
on the one hand, nothing becoming something, or something becoming
nothing, on the other hand. When God is said to create the universe out
of nothing, we think this by supposing that he evolves the universe out
of himself; and in like manner, we conceive annihilation only by
conceiving the