Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

RESURRECTION OF CULTURED HEATHENISM 147laws. A city could subsist without its foundeasily as without belief in the gods, without oaths,vows, divinations, sacrifices. No time is spent morejoyously than in the temples. No sights, no actionsconvey more delight than what we see and do for thegods, by presence at their rites and sacrifices. Theground of this joy is the good hope and belief thatGod is present propitiously, and receives ghat is done. All things belong to the gods, and thpossessions of friends are in common, and the goodfriends of the gods. That a friend of God should)t be happy, or the temperate and just man not bfriend of God, is impossible. What is done by th)ds we should expect to be erood : but that thesthings are done by the gods is a source of great delighand boundless confidence.1iAt the head of the universe he placed one God.Now the conception of which doubtless he felt theneed, which he yearned after, like other Platonics ofthe later school, was that of a God who should beliving, superior to nature, external to the world, aGod who has intelligence and who has will.2 In fact,Plutarch's God is the author of the universe, yet atNow in this view of the world and man wherein*does Plutarch differ from his Greek and Latin predecessorsan immeasurable distance above and beyond it. Somewherein that distance, but far below him, are placedthe visible heavenly gods, the gods to whom Plutarch'speople offered worship. In this system they arereduced to be ministering powers under the Supreme1 These various passages from Plutarch's works are referred to byZeller, v. 170.8 Dollinger, Heidenthum, p.