Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE STANDING-GROUND OF PHILOSOPHY l8lan exoteric mind much after Plutarch's pattern withregard to a supreme God, of whom all the mythologicalor elemental gods are parts or ministers ; andthe second is the maintenance in. practical life of allthe worship sanctioned by the laws. This means thatthe Greek thinkers were attempting to give a scientificbasis to the belief in the heathen gods which wasexpressed in their worship, and on this basis toreconcile philosophy with religion. Such a reconciliationhad never been thought of up to the timesAugustus O and Tiberius, * for its need had not beenfelt. Philosophy under various forms had been psistent in one thing, its enmity to the existing religworship. By it the thinking and cultured classes vd from that worship, and the alienation wasqually complete whether the Stoic, the Epor the Sceptic form of thought was preferred. Butthen the worship from which the bias of culturedthought led men away had during all this timeencountered no external enemy of its own kind. Ipass over the attraction of individual minds in the timeof the empire to Syrian or Egyptian gods as notcounting on a large scale. Viewed as a whole, noother worship had competed with it. It was in nodanger of falling by those various forms of philosophy,which, as a whole, consisted mainly in negation. Prayerand sacrifice supply an universal need in man whichcannot be satisfied by denying that it exists. So inthe times we have mentioned philosophic unbeliefwent on to a certain extent in the few minds whichform the cultured classes, while the great mass stillfound support in frequenting the established rites.Further also, the philosopher in practice did notsever himself from that worship as a custom and habit