exposed—Dion on true kingship—The vision of the Two Peaks—The ideal king—The sermon at Olympia inspired by the Zeus of Pheidias—Its majesty and benignity—Sources of the idea of God—The place of art in religion—Relative power of poetry and sculpture to express religious truth—Pheidias defends his anthropomorphism—His Zeus a God of mercy and peace Pages 334-383 CHAPTER III THE PHILOSOPHIC THEOLOGIAN The pagan revival and the growth of superstition called for a theodicy—Old Roman religion was still powerful—But there was an immense accretion of worships from the conquered countries—And an immense growth in the belief in genii, dreams, omens, and oracles—Yet amid the apparent chaos, there was a tendency, in the higher minds, to monotheism—The craving for a moral God in sympathy with man—The ideas of Apuleius, Epictetus, M. Aurelius—The change in the conception of God among the later Stoics—God no longer mere Force or Fate or impersonal Reason—He is a Father and Providence, giving moral support and comfort—The attitude of the later Stoics to external worship and anthropomorphic imagery—How was the ancient worship to be reconciled with purer conceptions of the Divine?—God being so remote, philosophy may discover spiritual help in all the religions of the past—The history of Neo-Pythagoreanism—Apollonius of Tyana—His attitude to mythology—His mysticism and ritualism—Plutarch’s associations and early history—His devotion to Greek tradition—His social life—His Lives of the great Greeks and Romans—He is a moralist rather than a pure philosopher—The tendency of philosophy in his day was towards the formation of character—The eclecticism of the time—Plutarch’s attitude to Platonism and Stoicism—His own moral system was drawn from various schools—Precepts for the formation of character—Plutarch on freedom and necessity—His contempt for rhetorical philosophy—Plutarch on Tranquillity—How to grow daily—The pathos of life—The need for a higher vision—How to reconcile the God of philosophy with the ancient mythology was the great problem—Plutarch’s conception of God—His cosmology mainly that of the _Timaeus_—The opposition between the philosophic idea of God and the belief of the crowd was an old one—Yet great political and spiritual changes had made it a more urgent question—The theology of Maximus of Tyre—His pure conception of God, combined with tolerance of legend and symbolism—Myth not to be discarded, but interpreted by philosophy, to discover the kernel of truth which is reverently veiled—The effort illustrated by the treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris—Its theory of Evil and daemonic powers—The Platonist daemonology—The history of daemons traced from Hesiod—The conception of daemons justified by Maximus—The daemonology of the early Greek philosophers—The nature of