When therefore the Platonic Sokrates in this treatise affirms authoritatively,--and affirms without any proof--his restricted version of the agency of the Gods, calling upon his countrymen to reject all that large portion of their religious belief, which rested upon the assumption of a wider agency, as being unworthy of the real attributes of the Gods,--he would confirm, in the minds of ordinary Athenians, the charge of culpable innovation in religion, preferred against him by his accusers. To set up _à priori_ a certain type (either Platonic or Epikurean) of what the Gods _must_ be, different from what they were commonly believed to be,--and then to disallow, as unworthy and incredible, all that was inconsistent with this type, including a full half of the narratives consecrated in the emotional belief of the public--all this could not but appear as "impious rationalism," on the part of "the Sophist Sokrates".[87] It would be not less repugnant to the feelings of ordinary Greeks, and would appear not more conclusive to their reason, than the arguments of rationalising critics upon many narratives of the Old Testament appear to orthodox readers of modern times--when these critics disallow as untrue many acts therein ascribed to God, on the ground that such acts are unworthy of a just and good being. [Footnote 87: Æschines cont. Timarch. [Greek: Sôkra/tê to\n sophistê/n]. Lucretius, i. 80. Illud in his rebus vereor, ne forté rearis Impia te rationis inire elementa, viamque Indugredi sceleris-- Plato, in Leges, v. 738 B, recognises the danger of disturbing the established and accredited religious [Greek: phê=mai], as well as the rites and ceremonies.] [Side-note: Aristophanes connects the idea of immorality with the freethinkers and their wicked misinterpretations.]