Had this remarkable doctrine been carried out fully it would have led to important results. We should have had goodness as the criterion of divinity, to the exclusion of power. God would have become avowedly an ideal, a pattern to which the world might or might not conform. Such potential conformity would have remained dependent on causes, natural or free, with which God, not being a power, could have nothing to do. Plato and Aristotle did, in fact, construct a theology on these lines, but they obscured its purity in their well-meant attempts to connect (more or less mythically or magically) their own Socratic principle of excellence with the cosmic principles of the earlier philosophers. The elements of confusion and pantheism which were thus introduced into the Socratic philosophy made it more acceptable, perhaps, to the theologians of later times, in whose religion a pantheistic tendency was also latent. In the hands of Jewish, Christian, or Mohammedan commentators the mythical and magical part of the Greek conceptions was naturally emphasized and the rational part reinterpreted and obscured. Plato had spoken, in one of his myths, of a Demiurgos, a personification of the Idea of the Good, who directly or indirectly made the world in his own image, rendering it as perfect as the indeterminate Chaos he worked on would allow. Aristotle had spoken of an intelligence, happy and self-contemplative, who was the principle of movement in the heavens, and through the heavens in the rest of Nature. Such expressions had a sound far too congruous with Mosaic doctrine not to be seized upon with joy by the apologists of the new faiths, who were glad to invoke the authority of classic poets and philosophers in favour of doctrines that in their Hebrew expression might so easily seem crude and irrational to the Gentiles. This assimilation gave to the casual myths of Plato and to the meagre though bold argumentation of Aristotle a turn and a significance which they hardly had to their authors. If we approach these philosophers as we should from the point of view of Greek literature and life, and prepare ourselves to see in them the disciples of Socrates rather than (what Plato was once actually declared to be) the disciples of Moses, we shall see that they were simply, mythologists of the Ideal; they refined the gods of tradition into patrons of civic discipline and art, the gods of natural philosophy into principles of intelligibility and beauty.