But the celestial deities of Aristotle, and the minor creative gods of Plato that correspond to them, retained too much poetic individuality for the still poorer imagination of later times. The most religious of sects during the classical decadence was that of the Stoics; in them the spirit of conformity, which is a chief part even of the religions of hope, constituted by its exclusive cultivation a religion of despair. The name of Zeus, and an equally equivocal use of the word "reason" to designate the regularity of Nature, served to disguise the alien brutality of the power or law to which all the gods had been reduced. Against the background of a materialistic pantheism, in which Stoic speculation culminated, two positive interests stood out: one, the resolute and truly human courage with which the Stoic faced the reality as he conceived it, and kept his dignity and his conscience pure although heaven might fall; the other, the efforts he made, in his need for religion, to rejuvenate and reinterpret the pagan forms. The fables he turned into ethical allegories, the oracles, auspices, and other superstitious rites, he transformed into quasi-scientific ways of reading the book of Nature and forecasting events. This possibility of prophecy constituted the Stoic "providence" which the sentimentality of modern apologists has been glad to confuse with the _benevolent_ Providence of Christian dogma, a Providence making for the salvation of men. The Stoic providence excluded that essential element of benevolence; it was merely the fact that Nature was prophetic of her own future, that her parts, both in space and in time, were magically composed into one living system. Mythology thus ended with the conception of a single god whose body was the whole physical universe, whose fable was all history, and whose character was the principle of the universal natural order. No attempt was made by the ancient Stoics to make this divinity better or more amiable than the evidence of experience showed it to be; the self-centred, self-sufficient Stoic morality, the recourse to suicide, and the equality in happiness and dignity between the wise man and Zeus, all prove quite conclusively that nothing more was asked or expected of Nature than what she chose to give; to be virtuous was in man's power, and nothing else was a good to man. The universe could neither benefit nor injure him; and thus we see that, despite a reverential tone and an occasional reminiscence of the thunderbolts of Zeus, the Stoic's conscience knew how to scorn the moral nothingness of that blank deity to which his metaphysics had reduced the genial company of the gods.