and well-cooked meats that gladden our hearts in a religious festival; it is our good hope and belief that God Himself is graciously present and approving our acts.” Without this conviction, he insists, the religious value of the ceremony is utterly lost.[327] To approach the gods with cheerfulness and courage and openness is the soul of Plutarch’s religion, and he is faithful to this principle on the most diverse occasions. Fond of Literature as he is, there are many famous passages of classical verse which he will not permit youthful students to carry away into their lives as factors in ethical progress until they have been harmonized with the claims of a rational criticism. Thus he quotes a verse of Sophocles—“God is a cause of fear to prudent men”—and insists that “fear” should be changed to “hope,” lest those should be justified who regard “with suspicion and dread as the cause of injury the power that is the principle and origin of all good.”[328] And when dealing with the sanctities of domestic life he insists that one important element of conjugal happiness lies in the avoidance of separate worship on the part of the wife, and in a closing of the door on superfluous ministrations and the practices of foreign superstition. “For,” says he, “there is no god who takes delight in stolen and secret sacrifices on the part of a wife.”[329] These passages, selected from various portions of Plutarch’s ethical teachings, show how strongly it is his practice to emphasize a note of cheerful and open courage in worship as an essential part of religious belief. But it is in the well-known essay “on Superstition” that he most thoroughly expounds this aspect of his philosophy, and no endeavour to understand Plutarch’s mental attitude in face of a problem which always affects humanity would be successful without a careful analysis of that treatise. The “De Iside et Osiride” attempts to safeguard the mind from the attacks of Superstition on the side of the Intellect, as the “De Superstitione” does on the side of the Imagination, and the two tracts have therefore an organic connexion which renders it necessary to treat them together as expounding different aspects of the same question. CHAPTER IX. _Relation between Superstition and Atheism: Atheism an intellectual error: Superstition an error involving the passions: the DE SUPERSTITIONE—Moral fervour of Plutarch’s attack on Superstition—His comparative tolerance of Atheism—The greatest safeguard against both alike consists in an intellectual appreciation of the Truth—The DE ISIDE ET OSIRIDE—The Unity underlying national differences of religious belief._