and then of the satisfaction which they had found for
their aspirations in the teaching of Jesus Christ, who, they were
convinced, was the very Word of God. Viewed merely from the historical
point of view, this process is full of interest as illustrating that
which was going on in many minds that stopped at the sceptical stage,
and, for one reason or another, never found refuge in the Christian
Church. But for those who did take this step, their former distrust of
the theistic argument, as a basis for religious conviction, must have
been greatly emphasized. The contrast between their former scepticism as
to man's ability to attain to any knowledge of things beyond the
phenomenal world, and their present faith and conviction which their
belief in the Person of Christ gave them, must have made the part of any
such means of arriving at truth as the already discredited theistic
argument most insignificant. They, themselves, had no need for it. All
it had been able to do for them, as for those to whom they wrote, was to
raise an aspiration which "would not down"--to bring them to the
hypothesis (substituted for polytheism, now outgrown) of an "Unknown
God," and they felt that their message to their contemporaries was, like
that of St. Paul to the Athenians on Areopagus: "Whom, therefore, ye
ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."

It is with this attitude in mind, I am convinced, that we must interpret
the doctrine, so often enunciated by the early Christian writers, but
especially by St. Justin Martyr and St. Clement of Alexandria, of the
"partial," "fragmentary" character of the theological truth arrived at
by Greek philosophy. They have sometimes been charged with
inconsistency in thus characterizing the work of men from whom they
borrowed so much, but they seem, in fact, to have been remarkably
appreciative of their old masters when we consider the position in which
they stood. In fact, they seem to grant to Greek philosophy all that its
adherents would claim for it, namely, that, by means of the arguments
adduced by its different schools, the Greeks had attained to the opinion
that there was something behind the phenomena of nature, but this might
as well be a transcendent force or a pantheistic world-soul as an
immanent God. With the Apostle on Mars' Hill they would say that the
best theology of the Greeks simply put them in a position "that they
should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him