The last great system of defence was the New Platonism.  It had not very much to do with Plato, except that it read him and quoted him as a great authority.  The Neo-Platonists did not face facts as Plato did.  They lived on quotations, on authority and fancy, great thinkers as some of them were.  They pictured the universe as one vast unity.  Far beyond all things is God.  Of God man can form no conception.  Think, they would say, of all the exalted and wonderful and beautiful concepts you can imagine; then deny them.  God is beyond.  God is beyond being; you can conceive of being, and therefore to predicate being of God is to limit him.  You cannot think of God; for, if you could think of God, God would be in relation with you; God is insusceptible of relation with man.  He neither wills, nor thinks of man, nor can man think of him.  A modern philosopher has summed up their God as the deification of the word “not.”  This God, then, who is not, willed—­no! not “willed”; he could not will; but whether he willed or did not will, in some way or other there was an emanation; not God, but very much of God; very divine, but not all God; from this another and another in a descending series, down to the daemons, and down to men.  All that is, is God; evil is not-being.  One of the great features of the system was that it guaranteed all the old religions—­for the crowd; while for the initiated, for the esoteric, it had something more—­it had mystic trance, mystic vision, mystic comprehension.  Twice or three times, Plotinus, by a great leap away from all mortal things, saw God.  In the meantime, the philosophy justified all the old rites.

Side by side with this great defence were what are known as the Christian heresies.  They are not exactly Christian.  Groups of people endeavoured to combine Christianity with the old thought, with philosophy, theosophy, theurgy, and magic.  They were eclectics; they compromised.  The German thinker, Novalis, said very justly that all eclectics are sceptics, and the more eclectic the more sceptic.  These mixtures could not prevail.

But religions have, historically, a wonderful way of living in spite of their weaknesses—­yes, and in spite of their apologetics.  A religion may be stained with all sorts of evil, and may communicate it; and yet it will survive, until there is an alternative with more truth and more dynamic.  The old paganism outlived Plato’s criticisms and Plutarch’s defences.  For the great masses of people neither might have written.

Into this world came the Christian Church.  I have tried to draw the picture of the great pagan religion, with its enormous strength, its universal acceptance, its great traditions, its splendours of art and ceremony, its manifest proofs of its gods—­everything that, to the ordinary mind, could make for reality and for power; to show how absolutely inconceivable it was that it could ever pass away.  Then comes the Christian Church—­a ludicrous collection