cured them as they lay.  Some of the cures recorded on the monuments are perhaps strange to our ideas of medicine.  One records how the god came to man dreadfully afflicted with dropsy, cut off his head, turned him upside down and let the fluid run out, and then replaced his head with a neat join.  Some modern readers may doubt this story; but that the god did heal people, men firmly believed.  We, too, may believe that people were healed, perhaps by living a healthy life in a quiet place, a life of regimen and diet; and perhaps faith-healing or suggestion played as strong a part as anything else.  Even the Christians believed that these gods had a certain power; they were evil spirits.

Not only the gods of the temples would manifest themselves of their grace.  Every man had a guardian spirit, a “genius”; and by proper means he could be “compelled” to show himself visibly.  The pupils of Plotinus conjured up his “genius”, and it came—­not a daemon, but a god.  The right formula ("mantram”) and the right stone in the hand—­and a man had a wonderful power over the gods themselves.  This was called “theurgy”.

But the great strength of this old religion was its infinite adaptability.  It made peace with every god and goddess that it met.  It adopted them all.  As a French scholar has said, where there is polytheism there are no false gods.  All the religions were fused and the gods were blended.  The Roman went to Greece and identified Jupiter with Zeus; he went to Egypt and found him in Amun (Ammon); he went to Syria and found him in Baal.  If the Jew had not been so foolish and awkward, there might have been a Jupiter Jehovah as well.  It was a catholic faith, embracing everything—­cult and creed and philosophy—­strong in all the ways we have surveyed and in many more, above all because it was unchallenged.

And yet, where is that religion to-day?  That, to me, is one of the most significant questions in history—­more so, the longer I stay in India.  Men knew that that religion of Greece and Rome was eternal; yet it is utterly gone.  Why?  How could it go?  What conceivable power was there, I do not say, to bring it down, but to abolish it so thoroughly, that not a soul in Egypt worships Isis—­how many even know her name?—­not a soul in Italy thinks of Jove but as a fancy, and Pallas Athene in Athens itself is a mere memory?  That is the problem, the historical problem, with which we have now to deal.

First of all, let us look again, and more closely, at that old religion—­we shall find in it at least four cardinal weaknesses.

First, it stands for “the unexamined life,” as Plato called it.  “The unexamined life,” he says, “is not liveable for a human being.”  A man, who is a man, must cross-examine life, must make life face up to him and yield its secrets.  He must know what it means, the significance of every relation of life—­father and child, man and wife, citizen and city, subject and king, man and the