Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 622

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Defense of an Essay, &c.

Nov.

this age of philosophy, and among Christian men, bow any could rest content without clear and definite views of the first cause of all things ; hence, if the ancients talk only of material, physical causes, and kɛep silence about a self-existent mind, many are impelled by their kindness to give them credit for knowing all about such an intelligent first cause, and suggest that they only forgot to mention it in their cosmo- gonies. Others again, if they meet with the word esos standing abso- lutely (in any old writer, as Homer), and can not readily infer from the context what god is meant, immediately jump to the conclusion that it is used propriè. They do not stay to inquire whether any such Being, as Him whom we call God (propriè), was known and worshiped in the Homeric age, (without which fact being established it seems over hasty to conclude that the writer had this Being in his mind, when he wrote the word drog in question) but decide at once that this being is designated, because, by drog standing absolutely, Greek wri- ters of a later age unquestionably did mean the intelligent First Cause.

To jump thus to conclusions without examining the premises can serve no purpose but to deceive ourselves. If we wish to ascertain whether the Greek word dog is used in Homer as the name of a being who is truly and properly God, we must inquire whether he and the Greeks of his age knew such a being, and called Him by this name ; and not content ourselves with merely finding a few instances in which this word stands absolutely, and thereupon refer it at once to such a Being, without taking the pains to inquire whether Homer knew any such Being or not, before we determine that he wrote about Him. From the Greek theogonies, from all their early writings, and from the gradual manner in which the idea of a monadic so grew clearer among the philosophers: from the reception this view met with from the common people, and from the fact that it never was popular among them even down to the time that Paul preached at Athens, I am satis- fied that it was not a native traditionary doctrine in Greece, and that the word sos was in use among them, as the name of a class of in- visible beings superior to men, who were regarded as proper objects of worship, long before Anaxagoras, or some other philosopher, first used it as the name by which to designate "a disposing Mind, the cause of all things.” This is the reason that induced me to say

in my Essay, that we find the Chinese shin where the Greek Philosophers found Asos, designating any one (as shown by the context or some qualifying word) of a class of Beings, who are all regarded as proper objects of worship. Whether I am correct or not in the opinion