Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an importance, the intensity of which made every other question insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity of philosophic speculation. Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be, the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether _matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion--the fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul. Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its control.