e stars and observe
all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond
the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature--the
immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and
supports all that exists?

This, with its markedly poetic swing, is surprisingly like the
passage in Plato's _Phaedo_, where Socrates says: 'If any man could
arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and come to
the top, then, like a fish who puts his head out of the water and
sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and if the nature of
man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other
world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the
true earth.' But even the thought, that the order and splendour of
Nature witnessed to the eternal powers which had created her, was not
strange to the Greek, as Aristotle proves in the remarks which Cicero
preserved to us in his treatise _On the Nature of the Gods_.

Well then did Aristotle observe: 'If there were men whose habitations
had been always underground, in great and commodious houses, adorned
with statues and pictures, finished with everything which they who
are reputed happy abound with, and if, without stirring from thence,
they should be informed of a certain divine power and majesty, and
after some time the earth should open, and they should quit their
dark abode to come to us, where they should immediately behold the
earth, the seas, the heavens, should consider the vast extent of the
clouds and force of the winds, should see the sun, and observe his
grandeur and beauty, and also his generative power, inasmuch as day
is occasioned by the diffusion of his light through the sky, and when
night has obscured the earth, they should contemplate the heavens
bespangled and adorned with stars, the surprising variety of the moon
in her increase and wane, the rising and setting of all the stars and
the inviolable regularity of all their courses; when,' says he, 'they
should see these things, they would undoubtedly conclude that there
are gods, and that these are their mighty works.'

Thus unconsciously the Greek Fathers of the Church took over the
thoughts of the great classic philosophers, only substituting a unity
for a plurality of godhead. To soar upon the wings of bird, wind, or
cloud, a _motif_ which we find here in Gregory of Nyssa, and which
reached its finest expression in Ganymede and the evening sc