Hereafter you may be--I fancy that I know you well enough to prophesy that you will be--able to recognise in the equilateral triangle inscribed within the circle, and touching it only with its angles, the three supra-sensual principles of existence, which are contained in Deity as it manifests itself in the physical universe, coinciding with its utmost limits, and yet, like it, dependent on that unseen central One which none dare name.' 'Ah!' said poor Philammon, blushing scarlet at the sense of his own dulness, 'I am, indeed, not worthy to have such wisdom wasted upon my imperfect apprehension....

But, if I may dare to ask....

does not Apollonius regard the circle, like all other curves, as not depending primarily on its own centre for its existence, but as generated by the section of any cone by a plane at right angles to its axis ?' 'But must we not draw, or at least conceive a circle, in order to produce that cone?
And is not the axis of that cone determined by the centre of that circle ?' Philammon stood rebuked.
'Do not be ashamed; you have only, unwittingly, laid open another, and perhaps, as deep a symbol.

Can you guess what it is ?' Philammon puzzled in vain.
'Does it not show you this?
That, as every conceivable right section of the cone discloses the circle, so in all which is fair and symmetric you will discover Deity, if you but analyse it in a right and symmetric direction ?' 'Beautiful!' said Philammon, while the old man added-- 'And does it not show us, too, how the one perfect and original philosophy may be discovered in all great writers, if we have but that scientific knowledge which will enable us to extract it ?' 'True, my father: but just now, I wish Philammon, by such thoughts as I have suggested, to rise to that higher and more spiritual insight into nature, which reveals her to us as instinct throughout--all fair and noble forms of her at least--with Deity itself; to make him feel that it is not enough to say, with the Christians, that God has made the world, if we make that very assertion an excuse for believing that His presence has been ever since withdrawn from it.' 'Christians, I think, would hardly say that,' said Philammon.
'Not in words.

But, in fact, they regard Deity as the maker of a dead machine, which, once made, will move of itself thenceforth, and repudiate as heretics every philosophic thinker, whether Gnostic or Platonist, who, unsatisfied with so dead, barren, and sordid a conception of the glorious all, wishes to honour the Deity by acknowledging His universal presence, and to believe, honestly, the assertion of their own Scriptures, that He lives and moves, and has His being in the universe.' Philammon gently suggested that the passage in question was worded somewhat differently in the Scripture.
'True.