Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Rénald Lévesque and the Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe at http://dp.rastko.net CHRISTIANITY AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY; OR, THE RELATION BETWEEN SPONTANEOUS AND REFLECTIVE THOUGHT IN GREECE AND THE POSITIVE TEACHING OF CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES. BY B.F. COCKER, D.D., PROFESSOR OF MORAL AND MENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN "Plato made me know the true God, Jesus Christ showed me the way tohim." ST. AUGUSTINE NEW YORK: CARLTON & LANAHAN. SAN FRANCISCO: E. THOMAS. CINCINNATI: HITCHCOCK & WALDEN. 1870. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by HARPER & BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. TO D.D. WHEDON, D.D., MY EARLIEST LITERARY FRIEND, WHOSE VIGOROUS WRITINGS HAVE STIMULATED MY INQUIRIES, WHOSE COUNSELS HAVE GUIDED MY STUDIES, AND WHOSE KIND AND GENEROUS WORDS HAVE ENCOURAGED ME TO PERSEVERANCE AMID NUMEROUS DIFFICULTIES, I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY MORE THAN ORDINARY AFFECTION _THE AUTHOR_. PREFACE. In preparing the present volume, the writer has been actuated by a conscientious desire to deepen and vivify our faith in the Christian system of truth, by showing that it does not rest _solely_ on a special class of facts, but upon all the facts of nature and humanity; that its authority does not repose _alone_ on the peculiar and supernatural events which transpired in Palestine, but also on the still broader foundations of the ideas and laws of the reason, and the common wants and instinctive yearnings of the human heart. It is his conviction that the course and constitution of nature, the whole current of history, and the entire development of human thought in the ages anterior to the advent of the Redeemer centre in, and can only be interpreted by, the purpose of redemption.