Thus the daemons serve two purposes in religious philosophy. They safeguard the Absolute and the higher gods from contact with matter, and they relieve the Author of Good from responsibility for evil. At the same time they supply the means of that relation to the divine which is essential for man's higher life--"passing on the prayers and supplications of men thitherward, and thence bringing oracles and gifts of blessing."[80] "They say well, who say that when Plato discovered the element underlying qualities that are begotten--what nowadays they call matter and nature--he set philosophers free from many great difficulties; but to me they seem to solve more difficulties and greater ones, who set the race of daemons between gods and {98} men and discovered that in some such way it made a community of us and brought us together, whether the theory belongs to the Magians who follow Zoroaster, or is Thracian and comes from Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian."[81] Homer, he adds, still uses the terms "gods" and "daemons" alike; "it was Hesiod who first clearly and distinctly set forth the four classes of beings endowed with reason, gods, daemons, heroes and finally men." The daemons, then, are the agents of Providence, of the One Reason, which orders the universe; they are the ministers of the divine care for man. And here perhaps their mediation is helped by the fact that the border lines between themselves and the gods above on the one hand, and men below on the other, are not fixed and final. Some daemons, such as Isis, Osiris, Herakles and Dionysos, have by their virtue risen to be gods,[82] while their own numbers have been recruited from the souls of good men.[83] "Souls which are delivered from becoming (_geneseos_) and thenceforth have rest from the body, as being utterly set free, are the daemons that care for men, as Hesiod says";[84] and, just as old athletes enjoy watching and encouraging young ones, "so the daemons, who through worth of soul are done with the conflicts of life," do not despise what they have left behind, but are kindly minded to such as strive for the same goal,--especially when they see them close upon their hope, struggling and all but touching it. As in the case of a shipwreck those on shore will run out into the waves to lend a hand to the sailors they can reach (though if they are out on the sea, to watch in silence is all that can be done), so the daemons help us "while the affairs of life break over us (_baptixomenous hypo ton pragmaton_) and we take one body after another as it were carriages." Above all they help us if we strive of our own virtue to be saved and reach the haven.[85]