of Christ) there was a temple where there were six thousand of these temple slaves.  I say again, that is the unexamined life.  God and goddess have nothing to say about some of the most sacred relations in life.  God, goddess, priest, worshipper, never gave a thought to these poor creatures, dedicated, not by themselves, to this awful life—­human natures with the craving of the real woman for husband and child, for the love of home, but never to know it.  That was associated with religion; that was religion.  There was always a minimum of protest from the Greek temples against wrong or for right.  It is remarked, again and again, that all the great lessons came, not from the temples, not from the priests, but from the poets and philosophers, from the thinkers in revolt against the religion of their people.  Curiously enough, even in Homer himself, it is plain that the heroes, the men, are on a higher moral plane than the gods; and all through Greek history the gods are a drag on morality.  What a weakness in religion!  The sense of wrong and right is innate in man; it may be undeveloped, or it may be deadened, but it is instinctive; and a religion which does not know it, or which finds the difference between right and wrong to lie in matters of taboo or ceremonial defilement, cannot speak to one of the deepest needs of the human heart, the need of forgiveness.  There is no righteousness, in the long run, about these gods.

In the third place, the religion has the common weakness of all polytheism.  Men were afraid of the gods; there were thousands and thousands, hosts of them.  At every turn you ran into one, a new one; you could never be certain that you would not offend some unknown god or goddess.  Superstition was the curse of the day.  You had to make peace with all these gods and goddesses—­and not with them alone.  For there was another class of supernatural beings, dangerous if unpropitiated, the daemons, the spirits that inhabited the air, that presided over life and its stages, that helped or hated the human soul, spiteful and evil half-divine beings, that sent illness, bad luck, madness, that stole the honours of the gods themselves and insisted on rituals and worship, often unclean, often cruel, but inevitable.  A man must watch himself closely if he was to be safe from them all, if he was to keep wife and child and home safe.

Superstition, men said, was the one curse of life that made no truce with sleep.  A famous Christian writer of the second century, Tatian, speaks of the enormous relief that he found in getting away from the tyranny of ten thousand gods to be under a monarchy of One.  A modern Japanese, Uchimura, said the same thing:  “One God, not eight millions; that was joyful news to me.”

Fourthly, this religion took from the grave none of its terrors.  There might be a world beyond, and there might not.  At any rate, “be initiated,” said the priests; “you will have to pay us something, but it is worth it.”  Prophets and quacks, said Plato, came to rich men’s doors and made them believe that they could rid them of all alarm for the next world, by incantations and charms and other things, by a series of feasts and jollifications.  So they said, and men did what they were told; but it did not take away the fear of death.