What then is to be said of Plutarch's religion? Here his experience was not so readily intelligible, and every inherited and acquired instinct within him conspired to make him cling to tradition and authority as opposed to independent judgment. His philosophy was not Plato's, in spite of much that he borrowed from Plato, for its motive was not the love of truth. The stress he lays upon the pleasure of believing shows that his ultimate canon is emotion. He does not really wish to find truth on its own account, though he honestly would like its support. He wishes to believe, and believe he will--_sit pro ratione voluntas_. "There is something of the woman in Plutarch," says Mr Lecky. Like men of this temperament in every age, he surrenders to emotion, and emotion declines into sentimentalism. He cannot firmly say that anything, with which religious feeling has ever been associated, has ceased to be useful and has become false. He may talk bravely of shutting the great door against Superstition, but Superstition has many entrances--indeed, was indoors already. We have only to look at his treatise on Isis and Osiris to see the effects of compromise in religion. He will never take a firm stand; there are always possibilities, explanations, parallels, suggestions, symbolisms, by which he can escape from facing {111} definitely the demand for a decisive reformation of religion. As a result, in spite of the radiant mist of amiability, which he diffuses over these Egyptian gods, till the old myths seem capable of every conceivable interpretation, and everything a symbol of everything else, and all is beautiful and holy--the foolish and indecent old stories remain a definite and integral part of the religion, the animals are still objects of worship and the image of Osiris stands in its original naked obscenity.[130] And the Egyptian is not the only religion, for, as Tertullian points out, the old rites are still practised every where!" with unabated horrors, symbol or no symbol.[131] Plutarch emphasizes the goodness and friendliness of the gods, but he leaves the evil daemons in all their activity. Strange and awful sacrifices of the past he deprecates, but he shows no reason why they should not continue. God, he says, is hardly to be conceived by man's mind as in a dream; and he thanks heaven for its peculiar grace that the oracles are reviving in his day; he believes in necromancy, theolepsy and nearly every other grotesque means of intercourse with gods and daemons. He calls himself a Platonist; he is proud of the great literature of Greece; but nearly all that we associate in religious thought with such names as Xenophanes, Euripides and Plato, he gently waves aside on the authority of Apollo. It raises the dignity of Seneca when we set beside him this delightful man of letters, so full of charm, so warm with the love of all that is beautiful, so closely knit to the tender