es to know God must
make its own effort; it cannot expect simply to lie still and be told.
The myths by their obvious falsity and absurdity on the surface
stimulate the mind capable of religion to probe deeper.

He proceeds to give instances, and chooses at once myths that had been
for generations the mock of the sceptic, and in his own day furnished
abundant ammunition for the artillery of Christian polemic. He takes
first Hesiod's story of Kronos swallowing his children; then the
Judgement of Paris; then comes a long and earnest explanation of the
myth of Attis and the Mother of the Gods. It is on the face of it a
story highly discreditable both to the heart and the head of those
august beings, and though the rites themselves do not seem to have been
in any way improper, the Christians naturally attacked the Pagans and
Julian personally for countenancing the worship. Sallustius's
explanation is taken directly from Julian's fifth oration in praise of
the Great Mother, and reduces the myth and the ritual to an expression
of the adventures of the Soul seeking God.

So much for the whole traditional mythology. It has been explained
completely away and made subservient to philosophy and edification,
while it can still be used as a great well-spring of religious emotion.
For the explanations given by Sallustius and Julian are never
rationalistic. They never stimulate a spirit of scepticism, always a
spirit of mysticism and reverence. And, lest by chance even this
reverent theorizing should have been somehow lacking in insight or true
piety, Sallustius ends with the prayer: 'When I say these things
concerning the myths, may the gods themselves and the spirits of those
who wrote the myths be gracious to me.'

He now leaves mythology and turns to the First Cause. It must be one,
and it must be present in all things. Thus, it cannot be Life, for, if
it were, all things would be alive. By a Platonic argument in which he
will still find some philosophers to follow him, he proves that
everything which exists, exists because of some goodness in it; and thus
arrives at the conclusion that the First Cause is +to agathon+, the
Good.

The gods are emanations or forces issuing from the Good; the makers of
this world are secondary gods; above them are the makers of the makers,
above all the One.

Next comes a proof that the world is eternal--a very important point of
doctrine; next that the soul is immortal; next a definition of th