Christians
and men without fear and trembling." "The same God," said Clement, "to
whom we owe the Old and New Testaments gave also to the Greeks their
Greek philosophy by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks."
Lactantius declared that the ancient philosophers "attained the full
truth and the whole mystery of religion." "One would suppose," said
Minucius Felix, "either that the Christians were philosophers, or the
philosophers Christians." "What is now called the Christian religion,"
said Augustine, "has existed among the ancients, and was not absent
from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh;
from which time the true religion, which existed already, began to be
called Christian." Jerome said that "the knowledge of God was present
by nature in all, nor was there any one born without God, or who had
not in himself the seeds of all virtues."[F]

How few modern sects reach even this point of impartiality! The usual
course of theologians is to deny, and to deny with fury, that any such
sympathy of religions exists. "There never was a time," says a
distinguished European preacher, "when there did not exist an infinite
gulf between the ideas of the ancients and the ideas of Christianity.
There is an end of Christianity if men agree in thinking the
contrary." And an eminent Unitarian preacher in America, Rev. A. P.
Peabody, says, "If the truths of Christianity are intuitive and
self-evident, how is it that they formed no part of any man's
consciousness till the advent of Christ?" How can any one look history
in the face, how can any man open even the dictionary of any ancient
language, and yet say this? What word sums up the highest Christian
virtue if not _philanthropy_? And yet the word is a Greek word, and
was used in the same sense before Christendom existed.[G]

Fortunately there have always been men whose larger minds could adapt
themselves to the truth instead of narrowing the truth to them. In
William Penn's "No Cross No Crown," one-half the pages are devoted to
the religious testimony of Christians, and one-half to that of the
non-Christian world. The writings of the most learned of English
Catholics, Digby, are a treasure-house of ancient religion, and the
conflict between the bigot and the scholar makes him deliciously
inconsistent. He states a doctrine, illustrates it from the schoolmen
or the fathers, proudly claims it as being monopolized by the
Christian church, and ends b