them the principles and seeds and ideas of all things that are brought about therein? Surely it is no more impossible that ten, or fifty, or a hundred worlds should be animated by the same rule of Reason, or should be administered in accordance with one and the same principle of action, than that a public assembly, an army, or a chorus, should obey the same co-ordinating power. Nay, an arrangement of this kind is in special harmony with the Divine Character.”[181] Plutarch cannot get away from his fixed belief in the absolute Unity of God, and with God’s Unity, as we have already seen, his Eternity and Immutability are involved. But Plutarch re-asserts this truth in various places and forms. In the tract “De Stoicorum Repugnantiis,” though chiefly dealing polemically with the inconsistencies and self-contradictions of Chrysippus and other early Stoics, he clearly exhibits his own views in several passages. In one place[182] he asserts that even those who deny the benevolence of God, as the Jews and the Syrians, do not imagine him as other than eternally and immutably existent, and quotes with approval a sentence from Antipater of Tarsus, to the effect that God is universally regarded as uncreate and eternal. A little later in the development of the argument[183] he adopts the Stoic position—which Chrysippus is represented as contradicting—that the idea of God includes the ideas of happiness, blessedness, self-sufficiency, which qualities are elsewhere shown to exist absolutely and independently of all conceivable causes of opposition.[184] “They are wrong who assert that the Divine Nature is eternal because it avoids and repels anything that might tend to its destruction. Immutability and Eternity must necessarily exist in the very nature of the Blessed One, requiring no exertion on his part to preserve and defend them.”