Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while Christianity offered him a sympathetic refuge, who can tell? Probably natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson--conservatism and taste--caused his adherence to the forms at least of the older creeds. There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and much to like. But if you read him in hopes of material for strange stories, you will be disappointed. Perhaps Lord Lytton and others who have invoked his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord Beaconsfield's tale) knew his name better than his doctrine. His "Enneads," even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not very light subjects of study. LUCRETIUS _To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford_. Dear Martin,--"How individuals found religious consolation from the creeds of ancient Greece and Rome" is, as you quote C. O. Muller, "a very curious question." It is odd that while we have countless books on the philosophy and the mythology and the ritual of the classic peoples, we hear about their religion in the modern sense scarcely anything from anybody. We know very well what gods they worshipped, and what sacrifices they offered to the Olympians, and what stories they told about their deities, and about the beginnings of things. We know, too, in a general way, that the gods were interested in morality. They would all punish offences in their own department, at least when it was a case of _numine laeso_, when the god who protected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality, or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were offended by perjury. But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods? What hope or what fears did he entertain with regard to the future life? Had he any sense of _sin_, as more than a thing that could be expiated by purification with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing the prayers and "masses," so to speak, of the mendicant clergy or charlatans, mentioned by Plato in the "Republic"? About these great questions of the religious life--the Future and man's fortunes in the future, the punishment or reward of justice or iniquity--we really know next to nothing. That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to me. The _De Rerum Natura_ was written for no other purpose than to destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men's minds from all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all dread or desire for the interference of the gods in this mortal life of ours on earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to "know the causes of things," except that the knowledge would bring "emancipation," as people call it, from the gods, to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of the Roman son to the Roman sire, under the _patria potestas_ or _in manu patris_.