Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE STANDING-GROUND OF PHILOSOPHY 205things intelligible, to Very Truth and to Very Being,that they are. Being beyond all he is by some ineffablepower the object of the intellect." This onthe one side, while on the other the whole heathenworld of divine things, demigods, heroes, sacrifices,oracles, finds in his system convenient space and roomenough. Then as for the idol worship, " if* any paythem not honour, because the stone or wood or brassor gold which any particular artist has wrought cannotbe a god, that is a pitiful wisdom. For who that isnot a mere simpleton thinks these things to be gods,and not rather things offered to them and representingthem ? "The work of Celsus is generally aggressive, butI am not " now concerned with his attacks on theChristian Faith ; I speak here of his own positivestanding-ground. It will be seen to coincide exactlywith that of Plutarch at the beginning of the century.And I think we may fairly conclude that it was theground which every man of cultivated mind amongthe heathen attempted to take, and that from thelast years of St. John, during the whole second andthird centuries, when any Christian argued againstthe multiplicity of gods, the idolatrous worship paidto them, and the impure and monstrous tales of theheathen mythology, the instructed class would meet himwith thia counter-belief in one supreme God. Thisbelief was shared, as we have seen, and most distinctlyexpressed by Epictetus, Plutarch, Dio of Prusa,Maxim us, Apuleius, Celsus, under whom the mythologicalgods would be ranged as parts or members ofthe " race possessing reason," while the offensive myths,imputing crimes to the deities, would partly be re-1 Origen, Contra Cels. vii. 62. -