a continual
vigilance, either there was something wanting to make him happy, or else
his beatitude was perfectly complete; but according to neither of these
can God be said to be blessed; not according to the first, for if
there be any deficiency there is no perfect bliss; not according to the
second, for, if there be nothing wanting to the felicity of God, it must
be a needless enterprise for him to busy himself in human affairs. And
how can it be supposed that God administers by his own providence human
concerns, when to vain and trifling persons prosperous things happen, to
great and high adverse? Agamemnon was both

A virtuous prince, for warlike acts renowned,
("Iliad," iii. 179.)

and by an adulterer and adulteress was vanquished and perfidiously
slain. Hercules, after he had freed the life of man from many things
that were pernicious to it, perished by the witchcraft and poison of
Deianira.

Thales said that the intelligence of the world was God.

Anaximander concluded that the stars were heavenly deities.

Democritus said that God, being a globe of fire, is the intelligence and
the soul of the world.

Pythagoras says that, of his principles, unity is God; and the good,
which is indeed the nature of a unity, is mind itself; but the binary
number, which is infinite, is a daemon, and evil,--about which the
multitude of material beings and this visible world are related.

Socrates and Plato agree that God is that which is one, hath its
original from its own self, is of a singular subsistence, is one only
being perfectly good; all these various names signifying goodness do
all centre in mind; hence God is to be understood as that mind and
intellect, which is a separate idea, that is to say, pure and unmixed of
all matter, and not mingled with anything subject to passions.

Aristotle's sentiment is, that God hath his residence in superior
regions, and hath placed his throne in the sphere of the universe, and
is a separate idea; which sphere is an ethereal body, which is by him
styled the fifth essence or quintessence. For there is a division of the
universe into spheres, which are contiguous by their nature but appear
to reason to be separated; and he concludes that each of the spheres is
an animal, composed of a body and soul; the body of them is ethereal,
moved orbicularly, the soul is the rational form, which is unmoved, and
yet is the cause that the sphere is in motion.

The Stoics affirm that