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APOLOGETICVS 47 133
take not, and the antiquity of the divine literature already
estabhshed is so far helpful to my argument in that it makes
it credible that this was the storehouse for all later wisdom.
And if I were not now reducing the size of this book, I might
run on to prove this also. What poet, what philosopher is
there, who has not drank at all from the fountain of the
prophets? It is from thence therefore that the philosophers
have watered the thirst of their genius, that what they have
taken from our -writings may put us on a level with them.
Thence, too, I fancy, philosophy was even banished by
certain peoples, as by the Thebans, the Spartans and the
Argives. 'While they are stri-ving to imitate our doctrines,
being both greedy as men -with a lust, as we have said, of
fame and of eloquence only, anything they took offence at
in the holy scriptures, such is their inquisitiveness, they
have at once rewritten it to suit their own fancy, neither
sufficiently beheving their di-vine character, which would
prevent them from garbhng them, nor yet sufficiently understanding
them, as being even then somewhat obscure, and
darkened even to the Jews themselves, whose property they
were beheved to be. For even when the truth was in simple
form, all the more did that ca-villing spirit of man, disdaining
belief, begin to falter, and thus they confounded in
uncertainty even that which they had found certain. For
having found only that there was a God, they disputed about
him not as they found him revealed, but as to his character,
his nature and abode. Some aver that he is incorporeal,
others corporeal, as the Platonists and Stoics respectively;
some think him to consist of atoms, others of numbers, as was
thought by Epicurus and Pythagoras (respectively), others of
fire, as Heraclitus thought: and the Platonists indeed (believe
him) to take care of the world, but the Epicureans on the
contrary hold him to be inactive and unemployed, and, if
I may say so, non-existent as far as human affairs are concerned,
while the Stoics believe him to be situated outside the world,
where, hke a potter, he makes this mass to revolve from without,
but the Rlatonists that he was inside the universe, and that
he remains inside that which he directs Uke a steersman. In
the same way they differ also about the universe itself, as to
whether it was created or uncreated, whether it will die or last
for ever; so also about the condition of the soul, which some
maintain is divine and eternal, and others perishable, as each
thought, so he either introduced a new opinion or modified an
old one. Nor can any wonder that the ingenuity of philosophers