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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
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