What the philosophers from the time of Thales had taken as their special work was to measure and estimate the visible world. And for the last four centuries of this period especially they made the nature and the needs, the supreme good and the happiness of man their chief concern, in subordination to which they continued their physical inquiries. And surely the judgment which an inspired writer formed of their travail must recur to the mind with great force at the end of the preceding review: “If they knew so much as to be able to estimate the visible world, why did they not more easily discover its Lord?”(476) Why from the goods which they beheld had they not power to know the sole possessor of being, nor when they gave attention to his works, recognised their artificer? Why did they esteem fire or breath, rapid air or circling stars, or the force of water, or the lights of heaven rulers of the universe? For if the visible beauty of these delighted them so that they conceived them to be gods, how did they not draw the conclusion that the Lord of these was so much better than they? for it was the Author of beauty who created them. If they were struck dumb with the sense of their power and operation, why did they not conceive how much more powerful He who made them was? For from the greatness and the beauty of creatures the parent of them is by the force of reason discerned.(477) From their capital error in this—which the same writer declares to be inexcusable(478)—proceeded their other errors concerning man, his nature, his supreme good, and his final end. It is here sufficient to note that down to the age of Claudius there is no appearance that either of these great errors would be corrected: and still less any appearance of the rise of a great religion which would cause the multitudinous altars of heathenism to disappear before the altar of the unknown God, and would construct a City of God in the midst of that population in the thinking minds of which divergent systems of philosophy had eaten out belief in the babel of false gods without implanting belief in a personal Creator, the author and the end of man. INDEX. _Academies_, the five, of Plato’s school, 480. _Adam_, his headship, 60, 62, 65; its result seen in his fall, 67. _Alexander_ the Great, effects of his conquests on Greek life, 436, 455. _Alexander Severus_, his treatment of Christians, 244. _Antoninus Pius_, extension of the Church in his reign, 197; treatment of it under him, 227-233; what aspect the Church bore to him, 233-7. _Apollonius_, a senator, martyred under Commodus, 302, 209, note 37. _Apostolic age_, result of, 186-7. _Aristotle_, his character as a philosopher, 429; his view of the soul, 430; relation of his philosophy to religion, 433; conception of the method of teaching, 420; what he says of Socrates, 390; his account of the generation of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, 400. _Athanasius, S._, 26, 32, 34, 37, 98.