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CHRISTIANITY

AND

GREEK PHILOSOPHY;

OR, THE RELATION BETWEEN
SPONTANEOUS AND REFLECTIVE THOUGHT IN GREECE
AND THE POSITIVE TEACHING OF
CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES.


BY B.F. COCKER, D.D.,

PROFESSOR OF MORAL AND MENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

"Plato made me know the true God, Jesus Christ showed me the way to
him."
                                                        ST. AUGUSTINE




NEW YORK: CARLTON & LANAHAN.
SAN FRANCISCO: E. THOMAS.
CINCINNATI: HITCHCOCK & WALDEN.

1870.



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by HARPER &
BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United
States for the Southern District of New York.




TO

D.D. WHEDON, D.D.,

MY EARLIEST LITERARY FRIEND, WHOSE VIGOROUS WRITINGS HAVE
STIMULATED MY INQUIRIES, WHOSE COUNSELS HAVE GUIDED
MY STUDIES, AND WHOSE KIND AND GENEROUS WORDS
HAVE ENCOURAGED ME TO PERSEVERANCE
AMID NUMEROUS DIFFICULTIES,
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY MORE THAN ORDINARY AFFECTION

_THE AUTHOR_.




PREFACE.


In preparing the present volume, the writer has been actuated by a
conscientious desire to deepen and vivify our faith in the Christian
system of truth, by showing that it does not rest _solely_ on a special
class of facts, but upon all the facts of nature and humanity; that its
authority does not repose _alone_ on the peculiar and supernatural
events which transpired in Palestine, but also on the still broader
foundations of the ideas and laws of the reason, and the common wants
and instinctive yearnings of the human heart. It is his conviction that
the course and constitution of nature, the whole current of history, and
the entire development of human thought in the ages anterior to the
advent of the Redeemer centre in, and can only be interpreted by, the
purpose of redemption.

The method hitherto most prevalent, of treating the history of human
thought as a series of isolated, disconnected, and lawless movements,
without unity and purpose; and the practice of denouncing the religions
and philosophies of the ancient world as inventions of satanic mischief,
or as the capricious and wicked efforts of humanity to relegate itself
from the bonds of allegiance to the One Supreme Lord and Lawgiver, have,
in his judgment, been prejudicial to the interests of all truth, and
especially injurious to the cause of