erial blessing, and--most
striking of all--it is addressed to no personal god. It is pure prayer.
Of course, to some it will feel thin and cold. Most men demand of their
religion more outward and personal help, more physical ecstasy, a more
heady atmosphere of illusion. No one man's attitude towards the
Uncharted can be quite the same as his neighbour's. In part
instinctively, in part superficially and self-consciously, each
generation of mankind reacts against the last. The grown man turns from
the lights that were thrust upon his eyes in childhood. The son shrugs
his shoulders at the watchwords that thrilled his father, and with
varying degrees of sensitiveness or dullness, of fuller or more
fragmentary experience, writes out for himself the manuscript of his
creed. Yet, even for the wildest or bravest rebel, that manuscript is
only a palimpsest. On the surface all is new writing, clean and
self-assertive. Underneath, dim but indelible in the very fibres of the
parchment, lie the characters of many ancient aspirations and raptures
and battles which his conscious mind has rejected or utterly forgotten.
And forgotten things, if there be real life in them, will sometimes
return out of the dust, vivid to help still in the forward groping of
humanity. A religious system like that of Eusebius or Marcus, or even
Sallustius, was not built up without much noble life and strenuous
thought and a steady passion for the knowledge of God. Things of that
make do not, as a rule, die for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[177:1] _De Vit. Contempl._, p. 477 M.

[177:2] _Conf._ ix. 9.

[178:1] Gibbon, chap. xxi, notes 161, 162.

[178:2] _Rise of the Greek Epic_, chap. i.

[180:1] +adolos kai kathara parresia.+

[181:1] 'Many of his sections come straight from Plotinus: xiv and xv
perhaps from Porphyry's _Letter to Marcella_, an invaluable document for
the religious side of Neo-Platonism. A few things (prayer to the souls
of the dead in iv, to the Cosmos in xvii, the doctrine of +tyche+, in
ix) are definitely un-Plotinian: probably concessions to popular
religion.'--_E. R. D._

[188:1] S. Reinach, _Orpheus_, p. 273 (Engl. trans., p. 185).

[188:2] See Ammianus, xxii. 12, on the bad effect of Julian's
sacrifices. Sacrifice was finally forbidden by the emperor Theodosius in
391. It was condemned by Theophrastus, and is said by Porphyry (_De
Abstinentia_, ii. 11) simply +labein ten archen ex adikias+.

[189:1] Sallustius's view of sacrifice