Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

POWER OF THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY347rites of heathen worship. They cared nothing forhis " Primal Being," but they burned incense beforethe statue of Jupiter, and were given up to a mostunspiritual devotion of Cybele and Aphrodite. Thusboth in what it taught itself, and in what it sufferedthe vast majority to practise, philosophy was exclusiveand eclectic. It was in all its course the exact contradictionof that divine word, " To the poor the Gospelis preached." It may be added, that in its conductit entirely disregarded that citizenship of the wholehuman race which it was the boast of Stoicism to setforth. The principle which we are told was inherentin Zeno's doctrine did not develop itself for manygenerations after him; but it remained always atheory, never carried into effect by philosophers. IfStoics taught universal brotherhood, Christians alonepractised it.4. Taking then the period from Claudius to Con-stantine, what had philosophy done to reunite thetriple strand of human belief, conduct, and worship ?It found belief and worship separated from each other,and conduct left to the insufficient support which theremains of an ancestral tradition gave ; and it showeditself absolutely impotent to create a society whichshould live and flourish by the union of the three.This creation of society is the test of power. It wasin the beginning a divine work. Human corruptionhad done its worst upon it, had divided the greatparts and made them struggling adversaries in a hugedislocated mass, rather than members yielding theirco-operation according to the measure of each part inone body. Philosophy could not repair the corruption.It produced, indeed, individual writers, used in thecloset, and affecting cognate minds, such as were