92 
the doctrine of their poet is not true, if they have not a right to claim God 
as related to them, — God is, in the strictest and fullest sense, their Father. 
I say again, in the strictest and fullest sense ; not in some vague sense, which 
is, indeed, Pantheistical, a sense which represents Him as the Father of all 
cattle, and trees, and flowers, and therefore their Father. The argument 
would be utterly worthless and contemptible if that were his meaning,” &c. 
59. These two pious writers seem, no doubt, to be widely 
opposed to each other, though both “ seeking after God.” 
The one earnestly denying in terms all real correspondence 
between God and man ; the other asserting paternity and 
wemustnot sonship, “ in the strictest and fullest sense.” 
Ses the an 6 d Other anc ^ familiar instances will occur to many, of 
deny the eon- a like fatal influence of the old ontologies on modern 
elusions. theology ; but enough now appears, from the facts 
before us, to show the impossibility of avoiding in this in- 
quiry a careful consideration of the relations between our- 
selves and the Supreme. It is not enough to give our em- 
phatic refusal to the conclusions of Pantheism, or of Anthro- 
pomorphism, as to the Divine character, if we are holding to 
the premisses which may lead to the one or the other. We 
will look then at those premisses. 
X. 
60. The doctrine of the old Peripatetics, which had so exalted 
the perfection of the Divine nature, To ov, as to deny to it all 
onom that we mean by the terms reason, intellect, or 
lations as to being’, on the ground of their implying lmperiec- 
between a ood tions, was yet, to a great extent, adopted by the 
and man. Christian schools. Not considering that to deny 
the Supreme Being all relation with the finite or phenomenal 
must be to deny Him all intelligent control of the world, if 
not to deny Creation itself as His act, the Christian schools 
were soon attracted by the apparent sublimity of such specu- 
lations as to the Perfection of God ; and, unwarned by the 
heretical affinities which had once marked this as the philo- 
sophy of Arianism, they gradually resolved all our thoughts 
Admitted by Divine Perfection into a “simplicity” which 
the Christian nearly attenuated the Divine Being into nothing. 
The train of thought which terminated in this has, 
it will appear, a singular mixture of the materialistic and the 
abstract. 
61 . It was the doctrine of Parmenides, transmitted and trans- 
muted (as we shall see) by the Alexandrian scholastics, that 
