world—­above all, man and God.  We must examine and know.  But this old religion stood by tradition and not reflection.  There was no deep sense of truth.  Plutarch admired his father, and he describes, with warm approval, how his father once said to a man:  “That is a dangerous question, not to be discussed at all—­when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reason and demonstration for everything.”  Such an attitude means mistrust, it means at bottom a fundamental unfaith.  The house is beautiful; do not touch it; it is riddled by white ants, by dry rot, and it would fall.  That is not faith; it is a strange confession; but all who hesitate at changes, I think, make that confession sooner or later.  There is a line of Kabir which puts the essence of this:  “Penance is not equal to truth, nor is there any sin like untruth.”  This was one of the essential weaknesses of that old religion—­its fear, and the absence of a deep sense of truth.

In the next place, there is no real association of morals with religion.  The old stories were full of the adventures of Jupiter, or Zeus, with the heroines, mortal women, whom he loved.  Of some 1900 wall paintings at Pompeii, examined by a German scholar and antiquary, some 1400 represent mythological subjects, largely the stories of the loves of Jupiter.  The Latin dramatist Terence pictures the young man looking at one of these paintings and saying to himself, “If Jupiter did it, why should not I?” Centuries later we find Augustine quoting that sentence.  It has been said that few things tended more strongly against morality than the stories of the gods preserved by Homer and Hesiod.  Plato loved Homer; so much the more striking is his resolve that in his “Republic” there should be no Homer.  Men said:  “Ah, but you don’t understand; those stories are allegories.  They do not mean what they say; they mean something deeper.”  But Plato said we must speak of God always as he is; we must in no case tell lies about God “whether they are allegories or whether they are not allegories.”  Plato, like every real thinker, sees that this pretence of allegory is a sham.  The story did its mischief whether it was allegory or not; it stood between man and God, and headed men on to wrong lines, turned men away from the moral standard.

There was more.  Every year, as we saw, men went to be initiated into the rites of Demeter at Eleusis, a few miles from Athens.  And we read how one of the great Athenian orators, Lysias, went there and took with him to be initiated a harlot, with whom he was living, and the woman’s proprietress—­a squalid party; and they were initiated.  Their morals made no difference; the priests and the goddesses offered no objection.  In the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth there were women slaves dedicated to the goddess, who owned them, and who received the wages of their shame.  With what voice could religion speak for morality in Corinth?  At Comana in Syria (we read in Strabo the geographer, about the time