More originality, because each
earnest man seems to think out for himself the deepest grounds of his
creed. Less originality, because, as I believe, one common Logos, Word,
Reason, reveals and unveils the same eternal truth to all who seek and
hunger for it.
Therefore we can, as the Christian philosophers of Alexandria did,
rejoice over every truth which their heathen adversaries beheld, and
attribute them, as Clement does, to the highest source, to the
inspiration of the one and universal Logos. With Clement, philosophy is
only hurtful when it is untrue to itself, and philosophy falsely so
called; true philosophy is an image of the truth, a divine gift bestowed
on the Greeks. The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art
and wisdom are from God. The wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar
endowment of nature, but when they have offered themselves for their
work, they receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom,
giving them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all cultivation of
sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment. The whole
intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down
from God to men. Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries on "an
inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being; and this Truth is that
concerning which the Lord Himself said: 'I am the Truth.
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