Already in these passages, which represent philosophers as discussing God in the terms familiar in Greek philosophy, we can discern a gradual breaking down of that metaphysical exclusiveness which had hitherto marked the philosophic conception of the Deity. We see God again becoming personal, and reverting to that interest in the affairs of mankind from which the philosophers, starting with Xenophanes, had, in their revulsion from the anthropomorphic realisms of the Epic traditions, excluded him. We can already note that Plutarch believes in the “goodness” of God in a sense quite distinct from the “absence of envy” distinguishing the Platonic Creator, or even from the sense involved in Plato’s admission that the gods love the just, since one always loves that which is made in one’s own image.[197] We can see him going further, indeed, than Aristotle, who compares the love of men for the gods to the love of children for their parents, a love which is based upon a recognition of their goodness and superiority, and of their having been the authors of the greatest benefits to humanity.[198] But we are not left without many explicit texts asserting the goodness of God to mankind in emphatic phrases. Plutarch agrees with those statesmen and philosophers who assert that the majesty of the Divine Nature is accompanied by goodness, magnanimity, graciousness and benignity in its attitude towards mankind.[199] We have already seen that Justice and Love are regarded by Plutarch as the most beautiful of all virtues, and those most in harmony with the Divine Nature,[200] and many isolated sentences could be quoted to demonstrate how firmly the belief in God’s goodness to man was fixed in Plutarch’s mind. We are fortunate, however, in possessing a special tract in which the personal character of the Divine Goodness is so clearly exhibited that a modern translator of the tract, writing from a “Theological Institution,” is able to say, “I am not aware, indeed, that even Christian writers who have attempted to defend the same truth within the same limits of natural theology, have been able to do anything better than to reaffirm his position, and perhaps amplify and illustrate his argument.”[201] The tract referred to is, of course, the famous production known as the “De Sera Numinis Vindicta.” It is a bold and beautiful attempt to reconcile the existence of an actively benevolent Deity with the long-continued, often permanent, impunity of wickedness in this world; an endeavour to solve the question raised, especially by Epicureans, but not unfraught with solicitude for philosophers of other schools, respecting the patent fact that human virtue and human vice have no natural and necessary connexion with human happiness on the one hand and human misery on the other. Christian translators of the piece, from Amyot down to the writers just quoted, have hailed it as an effective vindication of the ways of God to man, and Comte Joseph de Maistre, whose