And what makes this exclusiveness the more repulsive is its modernness. Paul himself quoted from the sublime hymn of Cleanthes to prove to the Greeks that they too recognized the Fatherhood of God. The early Christian apologists, living face to face with the elder religions, made no exclusive claims. Tertullian declared the soul to be an older authority than prophecy, and its voice the gift of God from the beginning. Justin Martyr said, "Those who live according to Reason are Christians, though you may call them atheists.... Such among the Greeks were Socrates and Heraclitus and the rest. They who have made or do make Reason (Logos) their rule of life are Christians and men without fear and trembling." "The same God," said Clement, "to whom we owe the Old and New Testaments gave also to the Greeks their Greek philosophy by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks." Lactantius declared that the ancient philosophers "attained the full truth and the whole mystery of religion." "One would suppose," said Minucius Felix, "either that the Christians were philosophers, or the philosophers Christians." "What is now called the Christian religion," said Augustine, "has existed among the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh; from which time the true religion, which existed already, began to be called Christian." Jerome said that "the knowledge of God was present by nature in all, nor was there any one born without God, or who had not in himself the seeds of all virtues."[F] How few modern sects reach even this point of impartiality! The usual course of theologians is to deny, and to deny with fury, that any such sympathy of religions exists. "There never was a time," says a distinguished European preacher, "when there did not exist an infinite gulf between the ideas of the ancients and the ideas of Christianity. There is an end of Christianity if men agree in thinking the contrary." And an eminent Unitarian preacher in America, Rev. A. P. Peabody, says, "If the truths of Christianity are intuitive and self-evident, how is it that they formed no part of any man's consciousness till the advent of Christ?" How can any one look history in the face, how can any man open even the dictionary of any ancient language, and yet say this? What word sums up the highest Christian virtue if not _philanthropy_? And yet the word is a Greek word, and was used in the same sense before Christendom existed.[G]