Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/131

 retained in an unshakable memory. His predictions of events are, therefore, really predictions, not statements of present facts; and the "rigorous certainty and universality" which they possess are the certainty and universality attaching to the human discoveries of the laws of geometry and the law of causation, and not to a divine insight which is omniscience because it is always regarding events as present, whether they are actually past, present, or to come. "Apollo is a prophet, and prophecy is the art of ascertaining the future from the present or the past. Now nothing exists without a cause, and prediction, therefore, depends upon reason. The present springs inevitably from the past, the future from the present. The one follows naturally upon the other by a succession which is unbroken from beginning to end, and, accordingly, he who knows the natural causes of past, present, and future events, and can connect their mutual relationships, can predict the future, knowing, in the words of Homer, 'things that are now, things that shall be, and things that are over.' The whole art of Dialectics consists in the knowledge of the Consequent."

Already in these passages, which represent philosophers as discussing God in the terms familiar in Greek philosophy, we can discern a gradual breaking down of that metaphysical exclusiveness which had hitherto marked the philosophic conception of the Deity. We see God again becoming personal, and reverting to that interest in the affairs of mankind'', 387 B, C.]