ATHERTON. Certainly. Mankind does not require a revelation to give them a religion, but to give them one which shall be altogether true. These Neo-Platonists were confronted by a religion intolerant of all others. They attempted, by keeping open house in their eclectic Pantheon, to excel where they thought their antagonist deficient. They failed to see in that benign intolerance of falsehood, which stood out as so strange a characteristic in the Christian faith, one of the credentials of its divine origin. No theory of the universe manufactured by a school can be a gospel to man’s soul. They forgot that lip-homage paid to all religions is the virtual denial of each. GOWER. Strange position, indeed, maintaining as their cardinal doctrine the unity and immutability of the divine nature, and entering the lists as conservators of polytheism; teaching the most abstract and defending the most gross conceptions of deity; exclaiming against vice, and solicitous to preserve all the incentives to it which swarm in every heathen mythology. Of a truth, no clean thing could be brought out of that unclean,—the new cloth would not mend the old garment. Men know that they _ought_ to worship; the question is, Whom? and How? WILLOUGHBY. Then, again, their attempt to combine religion and philosophy robbed the last of its only principle, the first of its only power. The religions lost in the process what sanctity and authoritativeness they had to lose, while speculation abandoned all scientific precision, and deserted its sole consistent basis in the reason. This endeavour to philosophise superstition could only issue in the paradoxical product of a philosophy without reason, and a superstition without faith. To make philosophy superstitious was not difficult, and they did that; but they could not—do what they would—make superstition philosophical. ATHERTON. Add, too, that Greek philosophy, which had always repelled the people, possessed no power to seclude them from the Christianity that sought them out. In vain did it borrow from Christianity a new refinement, and receive some rays of light from the very foe which fronted it—— WILLOUGHBY. As is very visible in the higher moral tone of Porphyry’s _Treatise on Abstinence_. ATHERTON. The struggles of heathendom to escape its doom only the more display its weakness and the justice of the sentence. GOWER. Like the man in the _Gesta Romanorum_, who came to the gate where every humpbacked, one-eyed, scald-headed passenger had to pay a penny for each infirmity: they were going only to demand toll for his hunch, but he resisted, and in the struggle was discovered to be amenable for every deformity and disease upon the table. So, no doubt, it must always be with systems, states, men, and dogs, that won’t know when they have had their day. The scuffle makes sad work with the patched clothes, false teeth, wig, and cosmetics. ATHERTON. Life is sweet.