f _life_."

And this is all that the Fathers, or Christian apologists, generally,
would claim for the theistic argument. It is a _practical_, not a
theoretical proof, and it is in this way that the early Christian
writers seem to regard it. They resort to it most frequently to show
that the Christian doctrine of God is not contrary to reason nor
inconsistent with the nature of things, and to demonstrate that such a
conception is demanded by man's very nature. In a word, their use of the
argument is confirmatory and explanatory rather than by way of absolute
proof and demonstration.

This attitude towards and use of the theistic argument, so radically
different from that of the Greek philosophers, perpetuated itself in the
post-Nicene literature of the Christian Church, and, in its main
features, remained unaltered, until the time when men who had abandoned
the faith in the Word which had been the main stay of the ante-Nicene
writers, and who yet were unwilling to abandon the great theistic idea
for which the world was indebted to Christianity alone, sought to
justify this idea on the basis of reason. It took the scepticism of a
Hume and the criticism of a Kant, and the re-adjustment of all their
followers to bring us back at the close of this nineteenth century into
substantial agreement with the common-sense estimate placed upon the
theistic argument by the ante-Nicene Fathers.

FOOTNOTES:

[92] _History of Philosophy_, Vol. I, Sec. 4.

[93] Burnet: _Early Greek Philosophy_, p. 25.

[94] _Stromata_, II, iv.

VITA.

The writer was born April 24, 1869, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He attended
the Ann Arbor Public Schools and the Ann Arbor High School. In 1892 he
received the degree of A. B. from the University of Michigan. In 1895 he
graduated from the General Theological Seminary, New York, and was
awarded the degree of B. D., which was formally conferred in accordance
with the rules of the Seminary one year later. In 1896, he received the
degree of A. M. from the University of Michigan. He pursued studies in
Philosophy at Harvard University during the first term of the year
1896-7, and at Columbia University from February, 1897, to February,
1898. He has been the post-graduate scholar of the Church University
Board of Regents from July, 1895, to the present time.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Basis of Early Christian Theism, by
Lawrence Thomas Cole

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