ime Mover. The
Epicureans, subordinating their theology to their ethical theory, and
unwilling to allow their deity to interfere with the world or with men's
affairs, developed and placed their dependence on the argument from
common consent. The Stoics, laying great stress upon the order,
proportion and harmony in the world, argued to mind as the reason for
this condition of things. But none of these philosophers, in the opinion
of the writer, attained to a conception of God which could in any real
or accepted sense of the word be called theistic, or which would satisfy
a mind accustomed to the idea of the Christian doctrine of God.

For the Greek writers never make any accurate distinction between {ho
theos, hoi theoi, to theion} and {ta theia}. They never conceive of
their {theos} as anything more than a rather larger and more majestic
member of the innumerable family of the divinities of which the poets
had sung--more spiritual only in so far as it was more vague and
indefinite, a sort of mysterious, mythical being to which is sometimes
attributed the same kind of personality possessed by the inferior gods,
and sometimes regarded as simply the abstract divinity which
characterized all of the gods. But that to which the arguments that we
have been discussing generally lead is not even so near to the theistic
conception as this modified polytheism, for they usually conduct us, as
we have already indicated, to nothing more than a (sometimes)
personified force of nature, principle of order, or abstract
conception--not a God. Take away the inaccurate and misleading terms by
which the original Greek is rendered in most of the English versions, in
which the enthusiasm of the student of comparative religions has taken
the place of the careful and accurate translator, and, aside from
frequent apostrophes, such as are continually addressed by the poets to
the many gods of the popular religion, the end of the arguments we have
been considering will be found to be as depicted above. In a word: Greek
philosophy, independent of Semitic influences, developed the _form_ of
the chief types of the theistic argument, but it failed utterly to
deduce from them a theism, being throughout in its theology either
polytheistic or pantheistic.

While considering this branch of our subject it would be impossible to
ignore another school of thought, which, while neither Greek nor Roman
in its nationality, yet derives so much of its philosophica