Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

RESURRECTION OF CULTURED HEATHENISM149pretation of myths to get rid of all the incoherencies,all the unseemly and immoral elements, all the corruptingtales, which attached to the vulgar worship.In reducing all these to the abstract operations ofone force, termed indifferently God, nature, fate, orprovidence, it had banished personality from the universe.Now all worship is between persons, andtherefore whatever aspect of conformity to this vulgarworship Stoicism could assume, it was in its essenceprofoundly impious. In Plutarch, on the contrary,was a system which strove to give a logical foundationto the existing worship. It conceived both a personalGod, and a hierarchy of personal intelligencesunder him, which took delight in acts of worship.It preserved the names and the rites of the existinggods, and strove to make acts of homage paid to them,as servants and ministers of the Supreme God, to bepart of a worship due to him. Finally, it fatheredupon demons, who had given way to sensuous attractions,all stories unworthy of the heavenly gods.Thus in Plutarch for the first time in Greek andRoman heathenism the bewildering world of Polytheismseems in process of reduction to order underan ever-mastering sense of the divine unity, in which,however, all the beings who take part and subserve ithave personal relations. Here was an attempt tomake a true and inward reconciliation between philosophyand the popular religion. The gods of thepopular religion, however debased in certain moraects the conception of them might be, were alwayspersonal beings. It was an attempt to give a reasonablebasis to that religion, which would lead naturallyto a pious observance of its rites. From his standiroint Plutarch could really believe that he who denied