Goethe's criticism on Heine may perhaps be applied to Lucian--"We cannot deny that he has many brilliant qualities, but he is wanting in love ... and thus he will never produce the effect which he ought."[48] Various views have been held of Lucian's contribution to the religious movement of the age; it has even been suggested that his Dialogues advanced the cause of Christianity. But when one reflects upon the tender hearts to be found in the literature of the century, it is difficult to think that Lucian can have had any effect on the mass of serious people, unless to quicken in them by repulsion the desire for something less terrible than a godless world of mockery and death, and the impulse to seek it in the ancestral faith of their fathers. He did not love men enough to understand their inmost mind. The instincts that drove men back upon the old religion were among the deepest in human nature, and of their strength Lucian had no idea. His admirers to-day speak of him as one whose question was always "Is it true?" We have seen that it was a question lightly asked and quickly answered. It is evident enough that his mockery of religion has some warrant in the follies and superstitions of his day. But such criticism as his, based upon knowledge incomplete and sympathy imperfect, is of little value. If a man's judgment upon religion is not to be external, he must have felt the need of a religion,--he must have had at some time the consciousness of imperative cravings and instincts which only a religion can satisfy. Such cravings are open to criticism, but men can neither be laughed out of them, nor indeed reasoned out of them; and however absurd a religion may seem, and however defective it may be, if it is {216} still the only available satisfaction of the deepest needs of which men are conscious, it will hold its own, despite mockery and despite philosophy--as we shall see in the course of the chapter, though two more critics of religion remain to be noticed. [Sidenote: Sextus Empiricus] Lucian was not the only man who sought to bring the age back to sound and untroubled thinking. There was a physician, Sextus--known from the school of medicine to which he belonged as Sextus Empiricus--who wrote a number of books about the end of the second century or the beginning of the third in defence of Scepticism. A medical work of his, and a treatise on the Soul are lost, but his _Pyrrhonean Sketches_ and his books _Against the Dogmatists_ remain--written in a Greek which suggests that he was himself a Greek and not a foreigner using the language. Physicists, mathematicians, grammarians, moralists, astrologers, come under his survey, and the particular attention which he gives to the Stoics is a material fact in fixing his date, for after about 200 A.D. they cease to be of importance. His own point of view a short extract from his sketches will exhibit fully enough for our present purpose.