“If any Pagans, Lord, Thy grace shall save
From wrath divine, this boon I humbly crave,
Plato and Plutarch save: Thine was the cause
Their speech supported: Thine, too, were the laws
Their hearts obeyed; and if their eyes were blind
To recognize Thee Lord of human kind,
Needs only that Thy gift of grace be shown
To bring them, and bring all men, to the Throne.”
[373] Dr. Martineau (Types of Ethical Theory, vol. i. p. 91) thinks that “we must go a little further than Zeller, who decides that Plato usually conceived of God as if personal, yet was restrained by a doctrine inconsistent with such conception from approaching it closely or setting it deliberately on any scientific ground,” and devotes several closely-reasoned pages to show that, although there was no room for a personal god in Plato’s philosophy, Plato himself was in distinct opposition to his own views as systematically expounded in his writings. “We may regard him as fully aware of the conditions of the problem, and, though unable to solve it without lesion of his dialectic, yet deliberately pronouncing judgment on the side of his religious feeling.” But pace tantorum virorum it will be admitted that the personality of God is not very evident in Plato when those who understand him best can only maintain that it is not essentially interwoven with his philosophy, having only an indirect and accidental existence which is not possible “without lesion of his dialectic.”
[374] “Abstractedly, the theology of the Stoics appears as a materialistic pantheism; God is represented as a fire, and the world as a mode of God.” (Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle, vol. i. p. 265.) In the famous “hymn of Cleanthes,” preserved, like so many other of the great wonders of classical literature, by Stobæus, Grant sees an emphatic recognition of the personality of God, but it is equally natural to regard the hymn as a more detailed expression of that necessity of submitting to Destiny—of living in accordance with nature—which Cleanthes enounces in that other famous fragment which Epictetus would have us hold ready to hand in all the circumstances of life:—