Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

POWER OF THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY 335Yet in spite of this ,defect it would appear that inGreek belief the gods collectively maintained thewhole world in its existing order. It was believedalso that the individual man in all his circumstances,in his whole spiritual and moral nature, was ruledand determined by the deity. Nor was it supposedhat the gods only worked upon the individual, butkewise that they guided and ruled the lot of pand states, and sent punishments upon them. Andthis divine rule was believed to be not only one ofpower but a moral government. Men conceived thgods to determine the course of events, and to maintain the right which they had established among merOn the maintenance of this right the moral order cthe world rested. They had made and they supportedwhat we call the law of nature. Thus in a well-knownpassage Sophocles speaks of "that holy purity of wordand deed, whose laws are inscribed on high, born inthe celestial sky, whose sire is heaven alone, nor haththe mortal nature of men produced them, nor willoblivion ever lull them to sleep. In these God isgreat, and grows not old."l So further, as thefoundations of the State are laid upon marriage andthe family, marriage itself was deemed to be thecreation of the gods, together with the variety ofcharacter and occupation given to the man and thewoman, which make the tie possible and desirable. Itis also to be noted that penal I justice formed an essentialpart of the divine idea in the Greek mind. Thus,they believed that the deity exercised his office ofpunishing with a law so stringent that he wouldrather destroy the innocent with the wicked, if theywere bound up indivisibly together, than pardon the1 (Edipns Rex, 863-872.