1. _To satisfy the demands of the popular faith_, which presented its facts to be explained no less than those of external nature. Plato had evidently a great veneration for antiquity, a peculiar regard for "tradition venerable through ancient report," and "doctrines hoary with years."[196] He aspired after supernatural light and guidance; he longed for some intercourse with, some communication from, the Deity. And whilst he found many things in the ancient legends which revolted his moral sense, and which his reason rejected, yet the sentiment and the lesson which pervades the whole of Grecian mythology, viz., that the gods are in ceaseless intercourse with the human race, and if men will do right the gods will protect and help them, was one which commended itself to his heart. [Footnote 196: Ibid., ch. v.] 2. These intermediate agents seem to have been demanded to _satisfy the disposition and tendency which has revealed itself in all systems, of interposing some scale of ascent between the material creation and the infinite Creator_. The mechanical theory of the universe has interposed its long series of secondary causes--the qualities, properties, laws, forces of nature; the vital theory which attaches a separate "soul" to the various parts of nature as the cause and intelligent director of its movements. Of these "souls" or gods, there were different orders and degrees--deified men or heroes, aërial, terrestrial, and celestial divinities, ascending from nature up to God. And this tendency to supply some scale of ascent towards the Deity, or at least to people the vast territory which seems to swell between the world and God, finds some countenance in "the angels and archangels," "the thrones, and dominions, and principalities, and powers" of the Christian scriptures.[197] 3. These inferior ministers also seemed to Plato to _increase the stately grandeur and imperial majesty of the Divine government._ They swell the retinue of the Deity in his grand "circuit through the highest arch of heaven."[198] They wait to execute the Divine commands. They are the agents of Divine providence, "the messengers of God" to men. [Footnote 197: "The gods of the Platonic system answer, in office and conception, to the angels of Christian Theology."--Butler, vol. i. p. 225.] [Footnote 198: "Phædrus," § 56,7.] 4. And, finally, the host of inferior deities interposed between the material sensible world and God seemed to Plato as _needful in order to explain the apparent defects and disorders of sublunary affairs_. Plato was jealous of the Divine honor. "All good must be ascribed to God, and nothing but good. We must find evil, disorder, suffering, in some other cause."[199] He therefore commits to the junior deities the task of creating animals, and of forming "the mortal part of man," because the mortal part is "possessed of certain dire and necessary passions."[200] [Footnote 199: "Republic," bk. ii. p.18.] [Footnote 200: "Timæus," xliv.]