From the first century onwards men began systematically to defend this old paganism.  Plutarch wrote a series of books in its behalf.  He brings in something like love of god for man.  He speaks of “the friendly Apollo.”  But the weakness of Plutarch as an apologist is his weakness as biographer—­he never really gets at the bottom of anything.  In biography he gives us the characteristic rather than the character.  Here he never faces the real issue.  It is all defence, apology, ingenuity; but he defends far too much.  He admits there are obscene rites; there had been human sacrifices; but the gods cannot have ordained them; daemons, who stole the names of gods, imposed these on men—­not the gods; men practised them to avert the anger of daemons.  The gods are good.  Waiving the fact that he had not much evidence for this in the mythology, how was a man to distinguish god from daemon, to know which is which?  He does not tell us.  Again he speaks of the image of Osiris with three “lingams”.  He apologizes for it; he defends it; for the triplicity is a symbol of godhead, and it means that God is the origin of all life.  Yes, but what that religion needed was a great reformer, who should have cut the religion clear adrift from idols of every kind, from the old mythology, from obscenity.  It may very well be that such a reformer was unthinkable; even if he had appeared, he would have been foredoomed to fail, as the compromise of the Stoics shows.  Plutarch and his kind did not attempt this.  They loved the past and the old ways.  At heart they were afraid of the gods and were afraid of tradition.  Culture and charm will do a great deal, but they do not suffice for a religion—­either to make one or to redeem it.

The Stoics reached, I think, the highest moral level in that Roman world—­great men, great teachers of morals, great characters; but as for the crowd, they said, let them go on in the religions of their own cities; what they had learnt from their fathers, let them do.  So much for the ignorant; for us, of course, something else.  That seems to be a fundamentally wrong defence of religion.  It gets the proportions wrong.  It means that we, who are people of culture, are a great deal nearer to God than the crowd.  But if we realize God at all, we feel that we are none of us very far apart down here.  The most brilliant men are amenable to the temptations of the savage and of the dock labourer.  There was a further danger, little noticed at first, that life is apt to be overborne by the vulgar, the ignorant, if there is not a steady campaign to enlighten every man.  The Roman house was full of slaves; they taught the children—­taught them about gods and goddesses, from Syria, from Egypt, and kept thought and life and morals on a low plane.  An ignorant public is, an unspeakable danger everywhere, but especially in religion.