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l of obtaining any valid and positive results--frequently became, instead of a sincere seeking after God, mere practice in the art of Rhetoric. And not only was it true that no one of the forms of the theistic argument brought conviction to any other mind than that of the man who regarded it with the partial enthusiasm of an originator or formulator, but even such an one was led to only the most vague and indefinite results. We have already seen how even the best theology of the Greeks led to nothing but a sort of organized or unified polytheism. A vague, fanciful first cause of physical phenomena, a general idea, abstracted out of all content, so as to leave no meaning for the human mind--whatever the imagination might make of it--a mechanical, magnetic force, to which all motion might conveniently be referred; a deified principle of order--and these held in conjunction with the popular polytheism, and impregnated with the national pantheistic conceptions--was all that Greek philosophy could offer to the higher religious aspirations of the educated man. The opinion of the Greek mind itself as to the character of the knowledge of God, to which the thought of their race had led them at the beginning of the Christian era was fitly expressed by those Athenians, who erected near the Areopagus the "altar on which was written, 'To the Unknown God.'"[86] The opinion (for in most cases it did not amount to a conviction) that there was an Unknown (or even, as many thought, an Unknowable) Divinity of some sort, which might account for the phenomena of the world, and which might be the truth behind the vagaries of the anthropomorphic polytheism, was as far as Greek thought had led men at the period with which we have to do. Their {theos} was really nothing more than Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable,"--a mysterious "force," to which everything was referred which could not be accounted for on the basis of scientific principles. Now if this was the case with the adherents of the heathen philosophical schools, how must the realization of the poverty of this result, and the distrust of the means which led to it, have been emphasized by the conversion of individuals from them to Christianity. It is a graphic picture which some of the Fathers paint for us of their eager search, in the different schools in turn, for some religious truth which would bring with it conviction; of their disappointment and consequent despair and scepticism,
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