=Science and Religion.=--When, now, this scientific mind began to consider the practical guidance of life, the older political and religious controls presented serious difficulty. The gods were supposed to reward the good and punish the evil,[64] but how could this be reconciled with their practices? Æschylus attempted a purifying and elevating of the divine ideal, similar to that which Israel's conception underwent in the work of the prophets. He magnified the dignity and providential government of Zeus, which, though dark, is yet just and certain. But the great obstacle was that the earlier and cruder conceptions of the gods had been fixed in literary form; the tales of Cronos's impiety to Uranos, of Zeus' deceitful messenger and marital unfaithfulness, of Aphrodite's amours, and Hermes' gift of theft, were all written in Hesiod and Homer. The cruder conceptions of the gods had thus become too firmly fixed in the popular imagination to be capable of becoming the bearers of advancing ethical ideals, and so not merely the irreverent scoffer, but the serious tragedian, Euripides, and the religious idealist, Plato, do not hesitate to challenge boldly the older conceptions, or to demand a revision of all this literature before it comes into the hands of the young. =Social Standards.=--The social standards of propriety and honorable conduct were likewise brought in question by advancing intelligence. The word which summed up the early Greek idea of the best type was _Kalokagathos_. This word was very nearly the equivalent of our English word "gentleman." It combined the elements of birth, ability, and refinement, but in the earlier usage the emphasis was upon the fact of birth, even as our terms "generous," "noble," "gentle," originally referred to membership in a "gens." Socrates investigated the current estimates and found that the people who were generally regarded as the "respectable," or, as we should say, the "best" people of Athens, were not necessarily either "fine" or "good" in person or character; the term had come to be one of "convention," without basis in reason. Plato goes still further and with a direct application of the rational standard to the current estimates, pokes fun at the conventional judgment of what constitutes the respectable gentleman.