the demands of time and space, and in part the fact that it
will avoid needless and tedious repetition. The use of the theistic
argument for some time after the Nicene period is fairly homogeneous,
and presents no important new considerations. The apologetic work of the
patristic writers was chiefly done in the ante-Nicene age; after that
discussion turned more upon questions within the scope of the Christian
Faith. The function of the age of the Councils was the formulation and
definition of Christian dogma upon the admitted basis of the revelation
of Jesus Christ.

This inquiry, therefore, will have to do with that interesting period
when the doctrines of the Christian Church were finding their connection
with and relation to the speculations of Greek philosophy, and when the
Christian philosophers and apologists were determining the attitude
which, for many centuries, revealed religion assumed toward the
demonstrations of natural theology.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Philosophy and Theology_, p. 176.

CHAPTER II

GREEK AND ROMAN THEISTIC ARGUMENTS

The first question that confronts us as we enter upon the discussion is
the preliminary inquiry: What had been done already in the way of
theistic argument, and in what condition did the Christian Church find
this argument when it first began to develop a system of apologetics?
And from the conditions of ancient thought, or, at least, from what we
know of it, this resolves itself into the question: How far had the
Greek philosophers advanced by means of speculative thought toward a
conscious theism, and by what means did the various individuals and
schools among them seek to prove the existence of the Divine? The answer
to this inquiry will involve a brief examination of the contributions of
the pre-Socratic philosophers (especially Anaxagoras), Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, Cicero, and the Hellenizing Jews
of Alexandria.

The thought of Greece before the time of Socrates, from the very nature
of its problem, and the material at its disposal, yields us but little
that can, without doing violence to the facts, be construed as bearing
on the theistic argument. The search of these early philosophers was,
indeed, for an {Arche}, but their interest in the inquiry, as a perusal of
the extant fragments of their writings will prove, was pre-eminently
cosmological. They strove to discover the eternal ground of all things,
but it was a principle to a