Then he adds:
"Ἅπαντα ὂ ἀγαθὸν εἶναι τὸν Θεόν,"—
meaning either "that every one good is God," or, what is preferable, "that God in all things is good."
Again, Æschylus the tragedian, setting forth the power of God, does not shrink from calling Him the Highest, in these words:
"Place God apart from mortals; and think not
That He is, like thyself, corporeal.
Thou know'st Him not. Now He appears as fire,
Dread force; as water now; and now as gloom;
And in the beasts is dimly shadowed forth,
In wind, and cloud, in lightning, thunder, rain;
And minister to Him the seas and rocks,
Each fountain and the water's floods and streams.
The mountains tremble, and the earth, the vast
Abyss of sea, and towering height of hills,
When on them looks the Sovereign's awful eye:
Almighty is the glory of the Most High God."[1]
Does he not seem to you to paraphrase that text, "At the presence of the Lord the earth trembles?"[2] In addition to these, the most prophetic Apollo is compelled—thus testifying to the glory of God—to say of Athene, when the Medes made war against Greece, that she besought and supplicated Zeus for Attica. The oracle is as follows:
"Pallas cannot Olympian Zeus propitiate,
Although with many words and sage advice she prays;
But he will give to the devouring fire many temples of the immortals,
Who now stand shaking with terror, and bathed in sweat;"[3]
and so forth.
Thearidas, in his book On Nature, writes: "There was then
- ↑ These lines of Æschylus are also quoted by Justin Martyr, De Monarchia, p. 330. (Dread force, ἄπλατος ὁρμή; Eusebius reads ὁρμῆ, dative. J. Langus has suggested (ἄπλαστος) uncreated; ἄπληστος (insatiate) has also been suggested.) The epithet of the text, which means primarily unapproachable, then dread or terrible, is applied by Pindar to fire.
- ↑ Ps. lxviii. 8.
- ↑ This Pythian oracle is given by Herodotus, and is quoted also by Eusebius and Theodoret.
