ments. Of these
"souls" or gods, there were different orders and degrees--deified men or
heroes, aerial, terrestrial, and celestial divinities, ascending from
nature up to God. And this tendency to supply some scale of ascent
towards the Deity, or at least to people the vast territory which seems
to swell between the world and God, finds some countenance in "the
angels and archangels," "the thrones, and dominions, and principalities,
and powers" of the Christian scriptures.[197]

3. These inferior ministers also seemed to Plato to _increase the
stately grandeur and imperial majesty of the Divine government._ They
swell the retinue of the Deity in his grand "circuit through the highest
arch of heaven."[198] They wait to execute the Divine commands. They are
the agents of Divine providence, "the messengers of God" to men.

[Footnote 197: "The gods of the Platonic system answer, in office and
conception, to the angels of Christian Theology."--Butler, vol. i. p.
225.]

[Footnote 198: "Phaedrus," Sec. 56,7.]

4. And, finally, the host of inferior deities interposed between the
material sensible world and God seemed to Plato as _needful in order to
explain the apparent defects and disorders of sublunary affairs_. Plato
was jealous of the Divine honor. "All good must be ascribed to God, and
nothing but good. We must find evil, disorder, suffering, in some other
cause."[199] He therefore commits to the junior deities the task of
creating animals, and of forming "the mortal part of man," because the
mortal part is "possessed of certain dire and necessary passions."[200]

[Footnote 199: "Republic," bk. ii. p.18.]

[Footnote 200: "Timaeus," xliv.]

Aristotle seems to have regarded the popular polytheism of Greece as a
perverted relic of a deeper and purer "Theology" which he conceives to
have been, in all probability, perfected in the distant past, and then
comparatively lost. He says--"The tradition has come down from very
ancient times, being left in a mythical garb to succeeding generations,
that these (the heavenly bodies) are gods, and that the Divinity
_encompasses the whole of nature_. There have been made, however, to
these certain fabulous additions for the purpose of winning the belief
of the multitude, and thus securing their obedience to the laws, and
their co-operation towards advancing the general welfare of the state.
These additions have been to the effect that these gods were of the same
form as men, and e