“And God from gloomy night Can raise unstained light, And can in darksome gloom obscure The day’s refulgence pure.” He alone who is able to make night during the period of day is God. In the _Phænomena_ Aratus writes thus: “With Zeus let us begin; whom let us ne’er, Being men, leave unexpressed. All full of Zeus, The streets, and throngs of men, and full the sea, And shores, and everywhere we Zeus enjoy.” He adds: “For we also are His offspring;....” that is, by creation. “Who, bland to men, Propitious signs displays, and to their tasks Arouses. For these signs in heaven He fixed, The constellations spread, and crowned the year With stars; to show to men the seasons’ tasks, That all things may proceed in order sure. Him ever first, Him last too, they adore: Hail Father, marvel great--great boon to men.” And before him, Homer, framing the world in accordance with Moses on the Vulcan-wrought shield, says: “On it he fashioned earth, and sky, and sea, And all the signs with which the heaven is crowned.”[851] For the Zeus celebrated in poems and prose compositions leads the mind up to God. And already, so to speak, Democritus writes, “that a few men are in the light, who stretch out their hands to that place which we Greeks now call the air. Zeus speaks all, and he hears all, and distributes and takes away, and he is king of all.” And more mystically the Bœotian Pindar, being a Pythagorean, says: “One is the race of gods and men, And of one mother both have breath;” that is, of matter: and names the one creator of these things, whom he calls Father, chief artificer, who furnishes the means of advancement on to divinity, according to merit. For I pass over Plato; he plainly, in the epistle to Erastus and Coriscus, is seen to exhibit the Father and Son somehow or other from the Hebrew Scriptures, exhorting in these words: “In invoking by oath, with not illiterate gravity, and with culture, the sister of gravity, God the author of all, and invoking Him by oath as the Lord, the Father of the Leader, and author; whom if ye study with a truly philosophical spirit, ye shall know.” And the address in the _Timæus_ calls the creator, Father, speaking thus: “Ye gods of gods, of whom I am Father; and the Creator of your works.” So that when he says, “Around the king of all, all things are, and because of Him are all things; and he [or that] is the cause of all good things; and around the second are the things second in order; and around the third, the third,” I understand nothing else than the Holy Trinity to be meant; for the third is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the second, by whom all things were made according to the will of the Father.