ttic academies and porticoes," but "rude, uncultured and untaught, such
as they have thee who have thee only; that very thing of the road, the
street, the workshop wholly;" and from his examination of this ordinary
soul he concludes that "the knowledge of our God is possessed by
all."[76] Minucius Felix appeals to this same common instinct and
exclaims:[77] "What! is it not true that I have in this matter the
consent of all men?" and Origen, in his reply to the attack of Celsus,
points to "the ineradicable idea of Him."[78] Novatian asserts[79] that
"the whole mind of man is conscious" of Him, "even if does not express
itself," and Lactantius thinks that for Cicero "it was no difficult
task, indeed, to refute the falsehoods of a few men who entertained
perverse sentiments by the testimony of communities and tribes, who on
this one point had no disagreement."[80]

Besides these instances in which the different types of the theistic
argument are used in an undeveloped, but yet in a pure form, there are
several places where a mixed form appears, the different conventional
processes being used in combination without being clearly
differentiated. Thus the argument from common consent and the argument
based on order or design are used in conjunction, the necessity of the
universal knowledge of God's existence being seen from the witness to
Him found in nature.[81] So, too, the arguments from order and from
design in nature are often used in conjunction, and in many passages it
is difficult to decide to which one of these two the author intends to
appeal primarily.[82] These undifferentiated or mixed arguments are
quite frequently to be seen in the patristic writings, and serve to
illustrate the eclectic character of their thoughts, often presenting in
one passage the forms of the theistic arguments peculiar to two opposed
schools in Greek philosophy; and they also indicate how incidentally and
naively the Fathers used such weapons, not taking the trouble to
differentiate one form from the other, though they could not have been
ignorant of such distinctions.

The first thing that strikes one's attention in this examination of the
use of the theistic argument in the early Christian writers is, as has
been indicated, the paucity of examples. When we consider the emphasis
laid upon this subject in the contemporaneous philosophical schools; the
constant appeal to one form or another of the argument by Stoic and
Epicurean alike; t