constantly changing
content, the revealed doctrine of God, manifested in due relations,
unity and completeness by the Incarnate Word, stands with the Fathers as
the principle to the particular rule or application--as the whole to the
part. As the revelation of God it came to them, not as the result of
man's investigation and speculation, colored by every change of time,
place and environment, a mere momentary phase of a process; but as
eternal verity, viewed, so far as man's powers would allow, in its
entirety and unity. Dorner expresses their position well when he says
that in Christianity "as the organism of the truth, the elements of
truth, elsewhere here and there to be met with in a scattered form or a
disfigured guise, come together in unity--a unity which, as it
personally appeared in the God-Man, so in the course of history ever
more and more rises upon the consciousness of mankind." The Fathers
think that in the Christian doctrine of God they find all the true
elements contributed by previous thought, and besides these an infinite
depth of truth unthought of by the Greeks, all unified and harmonized in
a way that makes it a sharp contrast to the fragmentary and abstract
character of the Hellenic theology. Christian doctrine represents to
them the stable, absolute truth, so far as it was revealed by the
Incarnate Word, the eternal verities in their completeness and unity, so
far as man is able to comprehend them. Philosophy represents the phase
or aspect of the truth which the conditions of thought at the time
demands and emphasizes, which will co-ordinate the data at present in
the foreground of consciousness. Thus they conceive of the facts of
Christian Theology as the goal towards which philosophy is (often
unconsciously) striving, but at which it can never arrive without the
"leap of faith." Once this leap is taken, however, these theological
verities become the major factors in the data to be co-ordinated, and
philosophy and theology come into that union and harmony which, in the
eyes of the Christian philosophers, is their normal relation.

This Eclectic attitude of the Fathers, and their deprecation of any
abstraction or partial statement usurping the place of the truth,
explains to some extent their treatment of the theistic argument.

In the first place it led them to distrust and reject any argument for
the existence of God which proceeded on the basis of reason alone, apart
from any content furnished