the gods; men practised them to
avert the anger of daemons. The gods are good. Waiving the fact that
he had not much evidence for this in the mythology, how was a man to
distinguish god from daemon, to know which is which? He does not
tell us. Again he speaks of the image of Osiris with three
"lingams". He apologizes for it; he defends it; for the triplicity
is a symbol of godhead, and it means that God is the origin of all
life. Yes, but what that religion needed was a great reformer, who
should have cut the religion clear adrift from idols of every kind,
from the old mythology, from obscenity. It may very well be that
such a reformer was unthinkable; even if he had appeared, he would
have been foredoomed to fail, as the compromise of the Stoics shows.
Plutarch and his kind did not attempt this. They loved the past and
the old ways. At heart they were afraid of the gods and were afraid
of tradition. Culture and charm will do a great deal, but they do
not suffice for a religion--either to make one or to redeem it.

The Stoics reached, I think, the highest moral level in that Roman
world--great men, great teachers of morals, great characters; but as
for the crowd, they said, let them go on in the religions of their
own cities; what they had learnt from their fathers, let them do. So
much for the ignorant; for us, of course, something else. That seems
to be a fundamentally wrong defence of religion. It gets the
proportions wrong. It means that we, who are people of culture, are
a great deal nearer to God than the crowd. But if we realize God at
all, we feel that we are none of us very far apart down here. The
most brilliant men are amenable to the temptations of the savage and
of the dock labourer. There was a further danger, little noticed at
first, that life is apt to be overborne by the vulgar, the ignorant,
if there is not a steady campaign to enlighten every man. The Roman
house was full of slaves; they taught the children--taught them
about gods and goddesses, from Syria, from Egypt, and kept thought
and life and morals on a low plane. An ignorant public is, an
unspeakable danger everywhere, but especially in religion.

The last great system of defence was the New Platonism. It had not
very much to do with Plato, except that it read him and quoted him
as a great authority. The Neo-Platonists did not face facts as Plato
did. They lived on quotations, on authority and fancy, great
thinkers as some of them were. They