His canon is the general taste and good sense of the educated man; a canon which, vague as it may seem, is based upon an intelligent knowledge of the practical needs of life, and produces results which are applicable in a remarkable degree to the satisfaction of such needs. As provisional illustrations of Plutarch’s method in the three spheres of Philosophy, Mythology, and National Custom, we may note the discussion on the nature of God in the “De Ε apud Delphos,” the criticism of the great national poets of Greece in the “Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat,” and the remarks in the “De Iside et Osiride” concerning certain religious practices in the worship of these two Egyptian deities. In the first-named tract the ostensible subjects of discussion are the nature and attributes of Apollo; but it soon becomes quite clear that the argument is concerned with the nature of Deity itself rather than with the functions of the traditional god. “We constantly hear theologians asserting and repeating in verse and in prose that the nature of God is eternal and incorruptible, but that this nature, by the operation of an intelligent and inevitable law, effects certain changes in its own form. At one time God reduces all nature to uniformity by changing His substance to fire; and, again, in a great variety of ways, under many forms, enters into the phenomenal world.[139] ... Philosophers, in their desire to conceal these high matters from the common herd, call God’s transmutation into fire by two names—Apollo, to express His unity; Phœbus, to describe His clear-shining purity. To denote God’s suffering the change of His nature into air and water and earth and stars, and the various species of plants and animals, they figuratively tell of ‘tearings asunder’ and ‘dismemberings,’ and in these aspects He is variously called Dionysus, Zagræus, Nyktelius, and Isodaites, and His ‘destructions’ and ‘disappearances,’ His ‘death’ and His ‘resurrection,’ are inventions, enigmas, and myths, fittingly expressing, for the general ear, the true nature of the changes in God’s essence in the formation of the world.”[140] Plutarch here represents himself as the speaker; and while Ammonius, who was Plutarch’s master,[141] and is always spoken of by him with the greatest reverence, is subsequently introduced as taking a different view of the processes by which God produced the world of phenomena, yet neither does he depart from the rational standpoint in his view of the terms under discussion.[142] In allusion to these terms, as explained by Plutarch from the Stoical view of the Divine Nature,[143] he says, “Surely God would be a less dignified figure than the child in the poem,[144] since the pastime which the child plays with mere sand, building castles to throw them down again, God would thus be ever playing with the universe. On the contrary, God has mysteriously cemented the universe together, overcoming that natural weakness in it