Creator to withdraw his creation from actuality into
power."[397] "It is by _faith_ we understand the worlds were framed by
the _word of God_, so that things which are were not made from things
which do appear"--that is, from pre-existent matter.

[Footnote 394: "Ousian asomaton."--Plato.]

[Footnote 395: Cudworth's "Intellectual System," vol. i. p. 269.]

[Footnote 396: Mansell's "Limits of Religious Thought," p. 100.]

[Footnote 397: Sir William Hamilton's "Discussions on Philosophy," p.
575.]

Those writers[398] are, therefore, clearly in error who assert that the
earliest question of Greek philosophy was, What is God? and that various
and discordant answers were given, Thales saying, water is God,
Anaximenes, air; Heraclitus, fire; Pythagoras, numbers; and so on. The
idea of God is a native intuition of the mind. It springs up
spontaneously from the depths of the human soul. The human mind
naturally recognizes God as an uncreated Mind, and recognizes itself as
"the offspring of God." And, therefore, it is simply impossible for it
to acknowledge water, or air, or fire, or any material thing to be its
God. Now they who reject this fundamental principle evidently
misapprehend the real problem of early Grecian philosophic thought. The
external world, the material universe, was the first object of their
inquiry, and the method of their inquiry was, at the first stage, purely
physical. Every object of sense had a beginning and an end; it rose out
of something, and it fell back into something. Beneath this ceaseless
flow and change there must be some permanent principle. What is that
stoicheon--that first element? The changes in the universe seem to obey
some principle of law--they have an orderly succession. What is that
morphe--that form, or ideal, or archetype, proper to each thing, and
according to which all things are produced? These changes must be
produced by some efficient cause, some power or being which is itself
immobile, and permanent, and eternal, and adequate to their production.
What is that arche tes kineseos--that first principle of movement Then,
lastly, there must be an end for which all things exist--a good reason
why things are as they are, and not otherwise. What is that to ou eneken
kai to agathon--that reason and good of all things? Now these are all
archai or first principles of the universe. "Common to all first
principles," says Aristotle, "is the being, the original, from which a
thing is,