. Men were afraid of the gods; there were thousands and
thousands, hosts of them. At every turn you ran into one, a new one;
you could never be certain that you would not offend some unknown
god or goddess. Superstition was the curse of the day. You had to
make peace with all these gods and goddesses--and not with them
alone. For there was another class of supernatural beings, dangerous
if unpropitiated, the daemons, the spirits that inhabited the air,
that presided over life and its stages, that helped or hated the
human soul, spiteful and evil half-divine beings, that sent illness,
bad luck, madness, that stole the honours of the gods themselves and
insisted on rituals and worship, often unclean, often cruel, but
inevitable. A man must watch himself closely if he was to be safe
from them all, if he was to keep wife and child and home safe.

Superstition, men said, was the one curse of life that made no truce
with sleep. A famous Christian writer of the second century, Tatian,
speaks of the enormous relief that he found in getting away from the
tyranny of ten thousand gods to be under a monarchy of One. A modern
Japanese, Uchimura, said the same thing: "One God, not eight
millions; that was joyful news to me."

Fourthly, this religion took from the grave none of its terrors.
There might be a world beyond, and there might not. At any rate, "be
initiated," said the priests; "you will have to pay us something,
but it is worth it." Prophets and quacks, said Plato, came to rich
men's doors and made them believe that they could rid them of all
alarm for the next world, by incantations and charms and other
things, by a series of feasts and jollifications. So they said, and
men did what they were told; but it did not take away the fear of
death.

From the first century onwards men began systematically to defend
this old paganism. Plutarch wrote a series of books in its behalf.
He brings in something like love of god for man. He speaks of "the
friendly Apollo." But the weakness of Plutarch as an apologist is
his weakness as biographer--he never really gets at the bottom of
anything. In biography he gives us the characteristic rather than
the character. Here he never faces the real issue. It is all
defence, apology, ingenuity; but he defends far too much. He admits
there are obscene rites; there had been human sacrifices; but the
gods cannot have ordained them; daemons, who stole the names of
gods, imposed these on men--not