"Mortals think the gods can be born, have their feelings, voice and form; but, could horses or oxen draw like men, they too would make their gods after their own image."[69]
"All things did Homer and Hesiod lay on the gods, Such as with mortals are full of blame and disgrace, To steal and debauch and outwit one another."[70]
Our prophet, to whose eyes Gentile religiousness was wholly of the gross Crœsus kind, little suspected that he had an ally, with such kindred tempers of faith and scorn, among the very peoples to whom he yearns to convey his truth. But ages after, when Israel and Greece had both issued into Christianity, the service of Xenophanes to the common truth was recounted by two Church writers--by Clement of Alexandria in his _Stromata_, and by Eusebius the historian in his _Præparatio Evangelica_.
We find, then, that monotheism had reached its most absolute expression in Israel in the same decade, in which the first efforts towards the conception of the unity of Being were just starting in Greece. But there is something more to be stated. In spite of the splendid progress, which it pursued from such beginnings, Greek philosophy never reached the height on which, with Second Isaiah, Hebrew prophecy already rests; and the reason has to do with two points on which we are now engaged,--the omnipotence and the righteousness of God.