{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/ecf/002/0020175.htm","path":"chr/ecf/002/0020175.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/002/0020175.htm","text":"Poets and philosophers have not been voted atheists for inquiring concerning God. Euripides, speaking of those who, according to popular preconception, are ignorantly called gods, says doubtingly:\u2014\n \u201cIf Zeus indeed does reign in heaven above,\nHe ought not on the righteous ills to send.\u201d 710\nBut speaking of Him who is apprehended by the understanding as matter of certain knowledge, he gives his opinion decidedly, and with intelligence, thus:\u2014\n \u201cSeest thou on high him who, with humid arms,\nClasps both the boundless ether and the earth?\nHim reckon Zeus, and him regard as God.\u201d 711\nFor, as to these so-called gods, he neither saw any real existences, to which a name is usually assigned, underlying them (\u201cZeus,\u201d for instance: \u201cwho Zeus is I know not, but by report\u201d), nor that any names were given to realities which actually do exist (for of what use are names to those who have no real existences underlying them?); but Him he did see by means of His works, considering with an eye to things unseen the things which are manifest in air, in ether, on earth. Him therefore, from whom proceed all created things, and by whose Spirit they are governed, he concluded to be God; and Sophocles agrees with him, when he says:\u2014\n \u201cThere is one God, in truth there is but one,\nWho made the heavens, and the broad earth beneath.\u201d 712\n[Euripides is speaking] of the nature of God, which fills His works with beauty, and teaching both where God must be, and that He must be One.\n[De Maistre, who talks nothing but sophistry when he rides his hobby, and who shocked the pope himself by his fanatical effort to demonstrate the papal system, is, nevertheless, very suggestive and interesting when he condescends to talk simply as a Christian. See his citations showing the heathen consciousness of one Supreme Being. Soir\u00e9es de St. P\u00e9tersbourg, vol. i. pp. 225, 280; vol. ii. pp. 379, 380.]\n131:710 131:711\nFrom an unknown play; the original is ambiguous; comp. Cic. De Nat Deorum, ii. c. 25, where the words are translated\u2014\u201cSeest thou this boundless ether on high which embraces the earth in its moist arms? Reckon this Zeus.\u201d Athenagoras cannot so have understood Euripides.\n131:712\nNot found in his extant works.","title":"Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol II: ATHENAGORAS: Chapter V.\u2014Testimony of the Poets to the Unity of God.","type":"page"}