Was there not complete protection for property, even though it consisted for the most part of slaves?  And did not this state of things last for more than a thousand years?  So that I can’t recognize, I must even protest against the practical aims and the necessity of religion in the sense indicated by you, and so popular now-a-days, that is, as an indispensable foundation of all legislative arrangements.  For, if you take that point of view, the pure and sacred endeavor after truth would, to say the least, appear quixotic, and even criminal, if it ventured, in its feeling of justice, to denounce the authoritative creed as a usurper who had taken possession of the throne of truth and maintained his position by keeping up the deception.

Demopheles.  But religion is not opposed to truth; it itself teaches truth.  And as the range of its activity is not a narrow lecture room, but the world and humanity at large, religion must conform to the requirements and comprehension of an audience so numerous and so mixed.  Religion must not let truth appear in its naked form; or, to use a medical simile, it must not exhibit it pure, but must employ a mythical vehicle, a medium, as it were.  You can also compare truth in this respect to certain chemical stuffs which in themselves are gaseous, but which for medicinal uses, as also for preservation or transmission, must be bound to a stable, solid base, because they would otherwise volatilize.  Chlorine gas, for example, is for all purposes applied only in the form of chlorides.  But if truth, pure, abstract and free from all mythical alloy, is always to remain unattainable, even by philosophers, it might be compared to fluorine, which cannot even be isolated, but must always appear in combination with other elements.  Or, to take a less scientific simile, truth, which is inexpressible except by means of myth and allegory, is like water, which can be carried about only in vessels; a philosopher who insists on obtaining it pure is like a man who breaks the jug in order to get the water by itself.  This is, perhaps, an exact analogy.  At any rate, religion is truth allegorically and mythically expressed, and so rendered attainable and digestible by mankind in general.  Mankind couldn’t possibly take it pure and unmixed, just as we can’t breathe pure oxygen; we require an addition of four times its bulk in nitrogen.  In plain language, the profound meaning, the high aim of life, can only be unfolded and presented to the masses symbolically, because they are incapable of grasping it in its true signification.  Philosophy, on the other hand, should be like the Eleusinian mysteries, for the few, the elite.