er object to hang his faith and happiness upon than just this
traditional hybrid which his own enlightenment was now dissolving. To
which part should he turn for support? In which quarter should he
continue to place the object of his worship?

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonic revision.]

From the age of the Sophists to the final disappearance of paganism
nearly a thousand years elapsed. A thousand years from the infliction of
a mortal wound to the moment of extinction is a long agony. Religions do
not disappear when they are discredited; it is requisite that they
should be replaced. For a thousand years the augurs may have laughed,
they were bound nevertheless to stand at their posts until the monks
came to relieve them. During this prolonged decrepitude paganism lived
on inertia, by accretions from the Orient, and by philosophic
reinterpretations. Of these reinterpretations the first was that
attempted by Plato, and afterward carried out by the neo-Platonists and
Christians into the notion of a supernatural spiritual hierarchy;
above, a dialectical deity, the hypostasis of intellect and its
ontological phases; below, a host of angels and demons, hypostases of
faculties, moral influences, and evil promptings. In other words, in the
diremption of myths which yielded here a natural phenomenon to be
explained and there a moral value to be embodied, Platonism attached
divinity exclusively to the moral element. The ideas, which were
essentially moral functions, were many and eternal; their physical
embodiments were adventitious to them and constituted a lapse, a
misfortune to be wiped out by an eventual reunion of the alienated
nature with its own ideal. Religion in such a system necessarily meant
redemption. In this movement paganism turned toward the future, toward
supernatural and revealed religion, and away from its own naturalistic
principle. Revelation, as Plato himself had said, was needed to guide a
mind which distrusted phenomena and recoiled from earthly pursuits.

[Sidenote: It made mythical entities of abstractions.]

This religion had the strength of despair, but all else in it was
weakness. Apart from a revelation which, until Christianity appeared,
remained nebulous and arbitrary, there could be no means of maintaining
the existence of those hypostasised moral entities. The effort to
separate them from the natural functions which they evidently expressed
could not succeed while any critical acumen or independence su