Let us not, therefore, be too hasty in representing the early philosophers as destitute of the idea of a God, because in the imperfect and fragmentary representations which are given us of the philosophical opinions of Thales, and Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, we find no explicit allusions to the _Uncreated Mind_ as the first principle and cause of all. A few sentences will comprehend the whole of what remains of the opinions of the earliest philosophers, and these were transmitted for ages by _oral_ tradition. To Plato and Aristotle we are chiefly indebted for a stereotype of those scattered, fragmentary sentences which came to their hands through the dim and distorting medium of more than two centuries. Surely no one imagines these few sentences contain and sum up the results of a lifetime of earnest thought, or represent all the opinions and beliefs of the earliest philosophers! And should we find therein no recognition of a personal God, would it not be most unfair and illogical to assert that they were utterly ignorant of a God, or wickedly denied his being? If they say "there is no God," then they are foolish Atheists; if they are silent on that subject, we have a right to assume they were Theists, for it is most natural to believe in God. And yet it has been quite customary for Christian teachers, after the manner of some Patristic writers, to deny to those early sages the smallest glimpse of underived and independent knowledge of a Divine Being, in their zeal to assert for the Sacred Scriptures the exclusive prerogative of revealing Him. Now in regard to the theological opinions of the Greek philosophers, we shall venture this general _lemma_--_the majority of them recognized an "incorporeal substance"_[394]_ an uncreated Intelligence, an ordering, governing Mind_. Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, who were Materialists, are perhaps the only exceptions. Many of them were Pantheists, in the higher form of Pantheism, which, though it associates the universe with its framer and mover, still makes "the moving principle" superior to that which is moved. The world was a living organism, "Whose body nature is, and God the soul."