Celsus held that Christians spoke of God in a way that was neither holy nor guiltless (_ouch hosios oud' euagos_, iv, 10); and he hinted that they did it to astonish ignorant listeners.[21] For himself, he was impressed with the thought, which Plato has in the _Timaeus_,--a sentence that sums up what many of the most serious and religious natures have felt and will always feel to be profoundly true: "The maker and father of this {245} whole fabric it is hard to find, and, when one has found him, it is impossible to speak of him to all men."[22] Like the men of his day, a true and deep instinct led him to point back to "inspired poets, wise men and philosophers," and to Plato "a more living (_energesteron_) teacher of theology"[23]--"though I should be surprised if you are able to follow him, seeing that you are utterly bound up in the flesh and see nothing clearly."[24] What the sages tell him of God, he proceeds to set forth. "Being and becoming, one is intelligible, the other visible, (_noeton, horaton_). Being is the sphere of truth; becoming, of error. Truth is the subject of knowledge; the other of opinion. Thought deals with the intelligible; sight with the visible. The mind recognizes the intelligible, the eye the visible. "What then the Sun is among things visible,--neither eye, nor sight--yet to the eye the cause of its seeing, to sight the cause of its existing (_synistathai_) by his means, to things visible the cause of their being seen, to all things endowed with sensation the cause of their existence (_ginesthai_) and indeed the cause himself of himself being seen; this HE is among things intelligible (_noeta_), who is neither mind, nor thought, nor knowledge, but to the mind the cause of thinking, to thought of its being by his means, to knowledge of our knowing by his means, to all things intelligible, to truth itself, and to being itself, the cause that they are--out beyond all things (_panton epekeina on_), intelligible only by some unspeakable faculty. "So have spoken men of mind; and if _you_ can understand anything of it, it is well for you. If you suppose a spirit descends from God to proclaim divine matters, it would be the spirit that proclaims this, that spirit with which men of old were filled and in consequence announced much that was good. But if you can take in nothing of it, be silent and hide your own ignorance, and do not say that those who see are blind, and those who run are lame, especially when you yourselves are utterly crippled and mutilated in soul, and live in the body--that is to say, in the dead element."[25]