THE DECLINE AND FALL

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chap, to meditate on the divinity of the logos, his toil-some and unavailing efforts recoiled on them-selves ; that the more he thought, the less hecomprehended ; and the more he wrote, the lesscapable was he of expressing his thoughts.In every step of the inquiry, we are compelledto feel and acknowledge the immeasurable dis-proportion between the size of the object andthe capacity of the human mind. We maystrive to abstract the notions of time, of space,and of matter, which so closely adhere to all theperceptionsof ourexperimental knowledge; butas soon as we presume to reason of infinite sub-stance, of spiritual generation ; as often as wededuce any positive conclusions from a nega-tive idea, we are involved in darkness, perplex-ity, and inevitable contradiction. As these dif-ficulties arise from the nature of the subject,they oppress, with the same insuperable weight,the philosophic and the theological disputant;but we may observe two essential and peculiarcircumstances, which discriminated the doc-trines of the catholic church from the opinionsof the platonic school.

Zeal of i. A chosen society of philosophers, men of a

t!ans! ins " liberal education and curious disposition, mightsilently meditate, and temperately discuss, in thegardens of Athens, or the library of Alexandria ,the abstruse questions of metaphysical science.The lofty speculations, which neither convincedthe understanding, nor agitated the passions, ofthe platonists themselves, were carelessly over-looked by the idle, the busy, and even the stu-