Origen was not of a pugnacious spirit—­it was well that he was not—­but with wide and thorough preparation he summoned all his energies to meet the foe.  Archdeacon Farrar says of him, that he had been trained in the whole circle of science.  He could argue with the pupils of Plato, or those of Zeno, on equal terms, and he deems it fortunate that one who was called, as he was, to be a teacher at Alexandria, where men of all nations and all creeds met, had a cosmopolitan training and a cosmopolitan spirit.

No less resolute was the effort of Ambrose in resisting the errors of Arianism, and he also adapted himself to the work in hand.  He had not been afraid of Platonism.  On the other hand, we are told that Plato, next to his Bible, constituted a part of his daily reading, and that, too, in the period of his ripest Christian experience, and when he carried his studies and his prayers far into the hours of the night.  But in dealing with Arianism he needed a special understanding of all its intricacies, and when among its advocates and supporters he encountered a powerful empress as well as her ablest advocates, he had need of all the powers within him—­that power of moral earnestness which had led him to give all his property to the poor—­that power of strong faith, which prepared him, if need be, to lay down his life—­the power of a disciplined intellect, and a thorough knowledge of the whole issue.

5.  The early Fathers not only studied the heathen philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, but they learned to employ them, and their successors continued to employ them, even to the Middle Ages, and the period of the Reformation.  As an intellectual framework, under which truth should be presented in logical order, it became a strong resource of the early Christian teachers.  Let me refer you on this point to the clear statements of Professor Shedd.[33] He has well said that “when Christianity was revealed in its last and beautiful form by the incarnation of the Eternal World, it found the human mind already occupied by human philosophy.  Educated men were Platonists, or Stoics, or Epicureans.  During the age of Apologetics, which extended from the end of the apostolic age to the death of Origen, the Church was called to grapple with these systems, to know as far as possible what they contained, and to discriminately treat their contents, rejecting some things, utilizing others.”  “We shall see,” he continues, “that Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero exerted more influence than all other philosophic minds united upon the greatest of Christian Fathers, upon the greatest of the School men, and upon the greatest of the theologians of the Reformation, Calvin and Melancthon; and if we look at European philosophy, as it has been unfolded in England, Germany, and France, we can perceive that all the modern philosophic schools have discussed the principles of human reason in very much the same manner in which Plato and Aristotle discussed them twenty-two centuries ago.”