aid in his heart, 'There is no God,'" and who _also_ maintained
that God was "that than which no greater can be thought."

From this survey it will be seen that, in the view of the Ante-Nicene
Christian authors, the theistic argument was valuable merely as a
propaedeutic to Christianity, but was superfluous for the believer in
Jesus Christ; the use of it cannot, as it had not in Greek thought,
bring proof, but only probability; even this uncertain result is only
vague and fragmentary in character, and was never unified and made
significant by the Greeks; its office in Christian evidences was merely
of an _ad hominem_ sort, and this only in its simpler and more practical
forms, in which the senses as well as reason had their testimony to
bear; and, lastly, the argument was used much more frequently by the
Western than by the Alexandrian and other Eastern Fathers.

FOOTNOTES:

[60] _Stromata_, V, 12.

[61] _De Spectaculis_, II.

[62] _Against Marcion_, I, 17.

[63] _Ibid._, V, 16. This is to justify his doctrine of the punishment
of the heathen.

[64] _Scapula_, II.

[65] _Against Celsus_, I, 23.

[66] _Plea for the Christians_, XV, XVI.

[67] I, 5 and 6.

[68] _Exhortation to the Heathen_, X.

[69] _Divine Institutes_, III, 20.

[70] Chap. II.

[71] _Treatise on the Anger of God_, X.

[72] E.g., Stirling: _Philosophy and Theology_, p. 179.

[73] _Trypho_, III, IV.

[74] _Stromata_, V, 14.

[75] _The Soul's Testimony_, I.

[76] _Of the Resurrection of the Flesh_, III.

[77] _Octavius_, XVIII.

[78] _Against Celsus_, II, 40.

[79] _De Trinitate_, VIII.

[80] _Divine Institutes_, I, 2.

[81] E.g., Irenaeus: _Against Heresy_, II, 9, 1; Tertullian: _Against
Marcion_, I, 10; Origen: _De Principiis_, I, 3, 1; Tertullian:
_Apology_, XVII; Lactantius: _Divine Institutes_, I, 2.

[82] E.g., Minucius Felix: _Octavius_, XVII, XVIII; Novatian: _De
Trinitate_ VIII; Dionysius the Great: _Fragments_, II, 1.

[83] E.g., "Justin, in Philosopher's garb, preached the word of God."
Eusebius, IV, 11.

[84] The mere list of Greek authors _quoted_ by St. Clement of
Alexandria occupies over fourteen quarto pages in Fabricius'
_Bibliotheka Graeca_.

[85] _Divine Institutes_, V. 4.

[86] _Acts_, XVII, 23.

[87] _Stromata_, I, 13.

[88] E.g., _Stromata_, VI, 5: "The one and only God was known by the
Greeks in a Gentile way, by the Jews Judaically, and in a new and
spiritual way by us." In I, 5, he says: