man.

Let us not despise the gem because it has been broken to fragments,
obscured by silt and mud. Still less let us fancy that one least
fragment of it is not more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel
of our own compounding, though it be polished and faceted never so
completely. For what are all these myths but fragments of that great
metaphysic idea, which, I boldly say, I believe to be at once the
justifier and the harmoniser of all philosophic truth which man has ever
discovered, or will discover; which Philo saw partially, and yet
clearly; which the Hebrew sages perceived far more deeply, because more
humanly and practically; which Saint Paul the Platonist, and yet the
Apostle, raised to its highest power, when he declared that the
immutable and self-existent Being, for whom the Greek sages sought, and
did not altogether seek in vain, has gathered together all things both
in heaven and in earth in one inspiring and creating Logos, who is both
God and Man?

Be this as it may, we find that from the time of Philo, the deepest
thought of the heathen world began to flow in a theologic channel. All
the great heathen thinkers henceforth are theologians. In the times of
Nero, for instance, Epictetus the slave, the regenerator of Stoicism, is
no mere speculator concerning entities and quiddities, correct or
incorrect. He is a slave searching for the secret of freedom, and
finding that it consists in escaping not from a master, but from self:
not to wealth and power, but to Jove. He discovers that Jove is, in
some most mysterious, but most real sense, the Father of men; he learns
to look up to that Father as his guide and friend.

Numenius, again, in the second century, was a man who had evidently