utiful, and that persuasive
visitation of the soul by the eternal and incorruptible by which she
feels herself purified, rescued from mortality, and given an inheritance
in the truth. This is precisely what Saint Augustine knew and felt with
remarkable clearness and persistence, and what he expressed unmistakably
by saying that every intellectual perception is knowledge of God or has
God's nature for its object.

Proofs of the existence of God are therefore not needed, since his
existence is in one sense obvious and in another of no religious
interest. It is obvious in the sense that the ideal is a term of moral
experience, and that truth, goodness, and beauty are inevitably
envisaged by any one whose life has in some measure a rational quality.
It is of no religious interest in the sense that perhaps some physical
or dynamic absolute might be scientifically discoverable in the dark
entrails of nature or of mind. The great difference between religion and
metaphysics is that religion looks for God at the top of life and
metaphysics at the bottom; a fact which explains why metaphysics has
such difficulty in finding God, while religion has never lost him.

This brings us to the grand characteristic and contradiction of Saint
Augustine's philosophy, a characteristic which can be best studied,
perhaps, in him, although it has been inherited by all Christian
theology and was already present in Stoic and Platonic speculation,
when the latter had lost its ethical moorings. This is the idea that the
same God who is the ideal of human aspiration is also the creator of the
universe and its only primary substance.

[Sidenote: Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato.]

If Plato, when he wrote that fine and profound passage in the sixth book
of the Republic, where he says that the good is the cause of all
intelligence in the mind and of all intelligibility in the object, and
indeed the principle of all essence and existence--if Plato could have
foreseen what his oracular hyperbole was to breed in the world, we may
well believe that he would have expunged it from his pages with the same
severity with which he banished the poets from his State. In the lips of
Socrates, and at that juncture in the argument of the Republic, those
sentences have a legitimate meaning. The good is the principle of
benefit, and the philosophers who are to rule the state will not be
alienated by their contemplations from practical wisdom, seeing that the