A moment's reflection will convince the most skeptical of the progress of morality and the advance of civilization. That which philosophers and emperors not only approved but practiced in the palmiest days of the commonwealths of Greece and Rome, is to-day penalized; and the person guilty of the offense is socially ostracized and branded with infamy and contempt. The above is only one of many illustrations of the demoralizing influence of the myths. The Greeks looked to the gods as models of behavior, and could see nothing wrong in paiderastia, since both Zeus and Apollo had practiced it. Nearly every crime committed by the Greeks and Romans was sought to be excused on the ground that the gods had done the same thing. Euthyphro justified mistreatment of his own father on the ground that Zeus had chased Cronos, his father, from the skies. Homer was not only the Bible, but the schoolbook of Grecian boys and girls throughout the world; and their minds were saturated at an early age with the escapades of the gods and goddesses as told by the immortal bard. Plato, in the "Republic," deprecates the influence of the Homeric myths upon the youth of Greece, when he says: "They are likely to have a bad effect on those who hear them; for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is convinced that similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by the kindred of the gods." And Seneca thus condemns the moral effect of the myth of Zeus and Alcmene: "What else is this appeal to the precedent of the gods for, but to inflame our lusts, and to furnish a free license and excuse for the corrupt act under shelter of its divine prototype?" "This," says the same author in another treatise, "has led to no other result than to deprive sin of its shame in man's eyes, when he saw that the gods were no better than himself."