furnishing the cause of Evil, it follows that Evil as well as Good must have an originating principle of its own.[1] But neither on the religious nor on the purely philosophic side does he carry this admission to the extent of accepting an Evil personality or principle equivalent in power to the Deity. On the one hand, he accepts the doctrine of subordinate Dæmons, whose evil propensities are ultimately under the control of the Omnipotent Author of Good, inasmuch as they are liable to pains and penances for their infraction of the laws He has imposed upon them; and on the other, he has learned from Greek philosophy the conception of [Greek: to apeiron], that infinite, formless "Matter," out of which the Demiurgus, making it the nurse and receptacle of the ideas, had created the Universe. He insists, indeed, that the two conceptions are familiar to Greek philosophers: Empedocles opposed [Greek: philotêta kai philian] to [Greek: neikos oulomenon]; the Pythagoreans had two well-known lists of contrary expressions.[2] Anaxagoras expressed the antithesis by [Greek: nous] and [Greek: apeiron]; Aristotle by [Greek: eidos] and [Greek: sterêsis]. In all these philosophical distinctions the inferiority of the second term is implied, and Plutarch asserts this inferiority in unmistakable terms. "The creation and formation of this world arose out of opposing, but not
- ↑ 369 D. "It is impossible," argued these ancient thinkers, "that moral life and death, that good and evil, can flow from a single source. It is impossible that a Holy God can have been the author of evil. Evil, then, must be referred to some other origin: it must have had an author of its own."—"Some Elements of Religion," by Canon Liddon (Lecture iv. sect. i.).
- ↑ 370 E.
