."

And each of the Greek schools, they would say, by resting their case on
some one of the various arguments, and emphasizing some one of the
attributes of the Deity at the expense of the others, had attained only
a partial and inadequate view, though true so far as it went. "Since,
therefore," says St. Clement of Alexandria,[87] "truth is one (for
falsehood has ten thousand by-paths); just as the Bacchantes tore
asunder the limbs of Pentheus, so the sects both of barbarian and
Hellenic philosophy have done with truth, and each vaunts as the whole
truth the portion which has fallen to its lot. But all, in my opinion,
are illuminated by the dawn of Light." These men were deeply
appreciative of the work of Greek philosophy so far as it went--even
assigning to it a place analogous to the Hebrew Scriptures[88]--but they
always attribute to it a distinctly propaedeutic office, and are careful
to emphasize its failure to lead to any firm and positive conviction of
the existence of God. That this was the position of the early Christian
philosophers might be shown by many passages, but we will content
ourselves with one example from the pages of St. Clement of Alexandria,
who assigned to Greek philosophy a higher place than any of the
patristic writers--so much so that his orthodoxy has frequently been
questioned because of it. He is fond of designating the knowledge of God
to which the Greeks had attained by the term "{periphrasis}." Thus he
concludes[89] an argument from common consent, already quoted, in these
words: "Much more did the philosophers among the Greeks, devoted to
investigation, starting from the Barbarian philosophy, attribute
providence to the 'invisible, and sole and most powerful, and most
skilful and supreme cause of all things, most beautiful;'--not knowing
the influences from these truths, unless instructed by us, and not even
how God is to be known naturally, but only, as we have already often
said, by a true periphrasis." "The men of highest repute among the
Greeks knew God, not by positive knowledge, but by indirect expression
({periphrasis})."[90] The indefinite and merely "probable" character of the
results which the Fathers think were reached by the theistic argument in
Greek thought explains to us the few examples of these proofs which we
find in their writings, and the certainty which they thought they had
found, and their consequent attitude toward all arguments of this
nature, which we have tri