giving them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all cultivation of
sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment. The whole
intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down
from God to men. Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries on "an
inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being; and this Truth is that
concerning which the Lord Himself said: 'I am the Truth.' And when the
initiated find, or rather receive, the true philosophy, they have it
from the Truth itself; that is from Him who is true."

While, then, these two schools had so many grounds in common, where was
their point of divergence? We shall find it, I believe, fairly
expressed in the dying words of Plotinus, the great father of
Neoplatonism. "I am striving to bring the God which is in us into
harmony with the God which is in the universe." Whether or not Plotinus
actually so spoke, that was what his disciples not only said that he
spoke, but what they would have wished him to speak. That one sentence
expresses the whole object of their philosophy.

But to that Pantaenus, Origen, Clement, and Augustine would have
answered: "And we, on the other hand, assert that the God which is in
the universe, is the same as the God which is in you, and is striving to
bring you into harmony with Himself." There is the experimentum crucis.
There is the vast gulf between the Christian and the Heathen schools,
which when any man had overleaped, the whole problem of the universe was
from that moment inverted. With Plotinus and his school man is seeking
for God: with Clement and his, God is seeking for man. With the
former, God is passive, and man active: with the latter, God is active,
man is passive--passive, that is, in so far as his business is to listen
when he is spoken to, to look at the light which is unveiled to him, to
submit himself to the inward laws which he feels reproving and checking