“All things are full of the gods,” was said by the heathen in former days; and in fact divinities abounded; this was not surprising. “God has chosen to Himself a people and spread His name over the whole earth, and to make His will to be known,” as we say now. Thus we know that God is, and that His commandments must be kept. To consider words as ideas is not wise. Why do we not imitate the savages who when they hear an organ for the first time have a great desire to open it in order to see what is inside; and we who are civilised play with much light-hearted readiness on the gigantic instrument of language without seeking to know the value of the sounds we draw from it; and the names of beings and objects which should exercise the most powerful influence to which moral things can be subjected, are treated as mere sounds. Have we asked ourselves the meaning of the word God? Many must answer no to this question. This is not well, in spite of the fact that those who have asked it in this form have not always succeeded in obtaining an answer; no one has formed a complete conception of God, since neither sense nor reason is equal to the task. Plato, although named “Divine” by the ancient philosophers and by Christian theologians, did not like to speak of _The Gods_, but replacing the plural by the singular used the word “Divine,” but he did not explain what he understood by this word. Plato certainly mentions the Creator of the Universe, the Father of humanity, but--“he does not tell His name, for he knew it not; he does not tell His colour, for he said it not; he does not tell His size, for he touched it not.”[51] Xenophanes, who lived 300 years before Plato, said, “There is one God, the greatest amongst gods and men; neither in form nor in thought like unto mortals.”[52] The Greek philosophers protested against all attempts to apply a name which should be adequate to the Supreme Being; since all the words chosen failed to grasp His essence, and only designated certain sides and points of view, predicting of Him whatever was most beautiful in nature. For this reason early Christian writers who were Greeks rather than Jews, who had studied in the schools of Plato and Aristotle, spoke of God in the same abstract language, the same negative terms; they said, “We cannot call Him Light, since Light is His creation; we cannot call Him Spirit, since the Spirit is His breath; nor Wisdom, since Wisdom emanates from Him; nor Force, since Force is the manifestation of His Power.”