means be expressed. Well done, Plato! Thou hast touched on the truth. But do not flag. Undertake with me the inquiry respecting the Good. For into all men whatever, especially those who are occupied with intellectual pursuits, a certain divine effluence has been instilled; wherefore, though reluctantly, they confess that God is one, indestructible, unbegotten, and that somewhere above in the tracts of heaven, in His own peculiar appropriate eminence, whence He surveys all things, He has an existence true and eternal.
"Tell me what I am to conceive God to be,
Who sees all things, and is Himself unseen,"
Euripides says. Accordingly, Menander seems to me to have fallen into error when he said:
"O sun! for thou, first of gods, ought to be worshipped,
By whom it is that we are able to see the other gods,"
For the sun never could show me the true God: but that healthful Word, that is the Sun of the soul, by whom alone, when He arises in the depths of the soul, the eye of the soul itself is irradiated. Whence accordingly, Democritus, not without reason, says, " that a few of the men of intellect, raising their hands upwards to what we Greeks now call the air (ηέρ), called the whole expanse Zeus, or God: He, too, knows all things, gives and takes away, and He is King of all."
Of the same sentiments is Plato, who somewhere alludes to God thus: "Around the King of all are all things, and He is the cause of all good things." Who, then, is the King of all? God, who is the measure of the truth of all existence. As, then, the things that are to be measured arc contained in the measure, so also the knowledge of God measures and comprehends truth. And the truly holy Moses says: "There shall not be in thy bag a balance and a balance, great or small, but a true and just balance shall be to thee,"[1] deeming the balance and measure and number of the whole to be God. For the unjust and unrighteous idols are hid at home in the bag, and, so to speak, in the polluted soul. But the only just measure is the only true God, always just, continuing the self-same; who measures all things, and weighs
- ↑ Deut. xxv. 13, 15.
