element in Gentile teachers. 117 'of the divine seminal Word which they had 'received.' The opponents of Christianity pleaded that it was of recent date, and that men who lived before its promulgation were irresponsible. Justin replies he has been taught...that Christ is the first born (TρwTÓTOKOV TOû EOû) of GOD, as being the Logos (Word, Reason), in which all the race of men partook. And those who lived with the Word, (with Reason) are Christians even if they were accounted atheists, as, among Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and those like them, and among non-Greeks Abraham, and Ananias, Azarias and Misael, and Elias, and many others....' But while Justin acknowledges in this way that there were, in one sense, Christians before Christ among the heathen and an actual working of the Word through the reason of man, he inclines to the popular but untenable belief, which had been long current at Alexandria, that the Gentile teaching on 'the immortality of the soul, and punishments after death and the like' were borrowed from the Jewish prophets1. Clement is equally undecided in his view of the origin of the truths of heathendom. On the whole he regards them as partly borrowed from 1 Just. M. Apol. ii. 8 (p. 188 Otto); ii. 13 (p. 200); Apol. i. 46 (p. 110); i. 44 (p. 106). Comp. Apol. i. 5; ii. 10. 118 Clement of Alexandria on Jewish revelation and partly derived from reason illuminated by the Word-the final source of reason. There was, he says, in philosophy a little fire, stolen as it were by a Prometheus, fit to give light, if duly fanned: faint traces of wisdom and an impulse from GOD. And so Greek philosophers were in this sense thieves and robbers, who before the Lord's coming took from the Hebrew prophets fragments of truth. They did not possess the deeper knowledge of its import (οὐ κατ ̓ ἐπίγνωσιν) but appropriated what they took as their own doctrines. Some truths they disfigured: others they overlaid with restless and foolish speculations: others they discovered, for perhaps they also had he concludes a spirit of wisdom.' Yet whatever might be the connexion between Jewish and Gentile doctrines, both systems were related to the Gospel as parts to the whole, and parts mutilated by the perverseness of men. The various schools of philosophy, Jewish and heathen alike, are described by Clement under a memorable image as rending in pieces the one Truth, as the Bacchanals rent the body of Pentheus and bore about the fragments in triumph. Each one, he says, boasts that the morsel which has fallen to it is all the Truth... Yet by the rising of the Light all things are brightened...and he continues, 'he that again combines the divided parts and 'unites the Word, the revelation, of GOD (Xóyos) in 'a perfect whole, will, we may be assured, look 'upon the Truth without peril.' But though Clement writes undecidedly as to the final source of the truths in Greek philosophy he expresses a definite judgment as to the office which philosophy fulfilled for the Greeks, and still in his time continued to fulfil, as a guide to righteousness—a work of divine providence 1. At the same time he limits the preparatory work of heathendom to the teaching of philosophers and poets. It was natural that he should do so. The classical religions of the Greeks and Romans had no sacred books. The last word of Greek religious thought was philosophy: the last word of Roman religious thought was law. Clement indeed was acquainted, at least by hearsay, with the writings and speculations of the Brahmans and of Zoroaster and of the Buddhists, but they appeared to him simply as the works of philosophers and not as the authoritative sources of wide-spread religious belief. The idea of a heathen book-religion was wholly strange to him. 1 Clem. Al. Strom. i. § 87, p. 369; i. § 57, p. 349. Comp. Strom. i. § 18; § 28; vi. § 159; § 42; § 167; i. § 99; vi. §§ 44, 47 ff. 2 Strom. i. § 68, p. 355; § 72, p. 360. Comp. iii. § 60, p. 538. Lightfoot Colossians, p. 155 note. 120 The old Book-religions opened to us. But for our purpose it will be best to confine our attention to the old 'Book-religions.' There is much of the deepest interest in the religious beliefs of savages: much also in the religious beliefs which are preserved in works of art; but the actual records from which men drew and still draw their faith are both more accessible and, with every allowance for their obscurity, more certain in their interpretation. A century ago such an inquiry as is now open to the theological student would have been impossible. As it is the original writings of Confucianism, Brahmanism Buddhism, Zoroastrianism are rapidly being placed before us in intelligible forms; and it can hardly be an accident that each of the three great families of speech offers collections of sacred books which present in a form capable of a direct analysis the faiths which correspond with them. CHAPTER V. PRAE-CHRISTIAN GENTILE SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEMS OF BEING. WHAT then, we have now to ask, are the characteristic thoughts which underlie the præChristian Book-religions? and what lessons can we learn from them? These lessons, as we have already seen, will be twofold, according as they are drawn from the original conceptions to which the several religions bear witness, and from the subsequent embodiments of them. The original conceptions will serve at once to enlarge and to define our view of man's religious nature; and if so, to illuminate our own faith; for if Christianity be, as we believe, universal, then every genuine expression of human religious thought will enable us to see in the Gospel some corresponding truth which answers to it. If we can understand what whole races of men were feeling after, we shall have a clue to the discovery of mysteries for which |