l of obtaining any valid and positive
results--frequently became, instead of a sincere seeking after God, mere
practice in the art of Rhetoric. And not only was it true that no one of
the forms of the theistic argument brought conviction to any other mind
than that of the man who regarded it with the partial enthusiasm of an
originator or formulator, but even such an one was led to only the most
vague and indefinite results. We have already seen how even the best
theology of the Greeks led to nothing but a sort of organized or unified
polytheism. A vague, fanciful first cause of physical phenomena, a
general idea, abstracted out of all content, so as to leave no meaning
for the human mind--whatever the imagination might make of it--a
mechanical, magnetic force, to which all motion might conveniently be
referred; a deified principle of order--and these held in conjunction
with the popular polytheism, and impregnated with the national
pantheistic conceptions--was all that Greek philosophy could offer to
the higher religious aspirations of the educated man. The opinion of the
Greek mind itself as to the character of the knowledge of God, to which
the thought of their race had led them at the beginning of the Christian
era was fitly expressed by those Athenians, who erected near the
Areopagus the "altar on which was written, 'To the Unknown God.'"[86]
The opinion (for in most cases it did not amount to a conviction) that
there was an Unknown (or even, as many thought, an Unknowable) Divinity
of some sort, which might account for the phenomena of the world, and
which might be the truth behind the vagaries of the anthropomorphic
polytheism, was as far as Greek thought had led men at the period with
which we have to do. Their {theos} was really nothing more than Mr. Herbert
Spencer's "Unknowable,"--a mysterious "force," to which everything was
referred which could not be accounted for on the basis of scientific
principles.

Now if this was the case with the adherents of the heathen philosophical
schools, how must the realization of the poverty of this result, and the
distrust of the means which led to it, have been emphasized by the
conversion of individuals from them to Christianity. It is a graphic
picture which some of the Fathers paint for us of their eager search, in
the different schools in turn, for some religious truth which would
bring with it conviction; of their disappointment and consequent despair
and scepticism,