ure is in no way able to
seek after God, or to attain a clear knowledge of Him without the help
of Him whom it seeks."[47]

The inconsistency between these two fundamental positions of the
Fathers, of which much is often made, is, I think, more apparent than
real. For they make a clear distinction in their thought, though the
mere language which they use is sometimes confusing, between knowledge
of the existence of God--the undefined feeling or belief that there is a
God--which is the "innate opinion," for which they give every man
credit; and the knowledge of God, _i.e._, of His attributes, etc., the
subject-matter of dogmatic theology. The existence of the former of
these, it is true, as of the latter, may be obscured and nearly
obliterated by sin and the consequent disorganization; for in the
teaching of the Fathers, as in that of their Master, it is the pure in
heart that see God,[48] and it is only the man whose nature is kept in
due balance by a life of moral rectitude--the "righteous man" of the
Scriptures--who can be expected to exhibit clearly this "natural
opinion" or to attain to a full knowledge and appreciation of the
Christian doctrine of God. At the very best, the knowledge of the Deity
attained apart from revelation seemed to the Fathers to be, in
comparison with their own certainty, miserably vague and conjectural,
and they are constantly contrasting, in the most striking and graphic
way, the contradictory and uncertain results to which the philosophers
attained with the definiteness and consistency of the already
well-defined doctrine of the Christian church. To them certainty in
regard to knowledge of God can only come by means of the testimony of
one who had seen and known,[49] and this testimony they are satisfied
that they find in two places chiefly--first, in the testimony of the
Prophets of the Old Testament, and, second, but in fact primarily, in
the life and words of Jesus Christ, "the Word."

Of the antiquity and reliability of this first source--the
Prophets--they were never tired of talking, and they were so confident
of the necessity of resorting to it that they developed their famous
theory of the indebtedness of Plato and Aristotle to those Hebrew seers
for their theology. "From every point of view, therefore," concludes St.
Justin Martyr, "it must be seen that in no other way than only from the
prophets, who teach us by divine inspiration, is it at all possible to
learn anything concer