Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/123

 and wonder to the God as eternally existent, the other is a reminder to mortality of the frail nature that encompasseth it."

Nowhere is the necessity which Plutarch feels for believing in one supreme ruler of all the imaginable universe more apparent than in a passage in which he is seeking a regulating Intelligence for an admitted plurality of worlds, to account for whose administration a Greek of almost any period would have been constrained to resort to the hypothesis of a plurality of gods, supreme as each individual god might be in his own individual world. The passage in question initiates a discussion on this subject somewhat episodical to the main argument of the "De Defectu Oraculorum." Plutarch himself is the speaker, though he represents his interlocutors as addressing him by the name of Lamprias. He is inclined to agree that there may be more worlds than one, though repudiating an infinity of worlds. "It is more consonant with reason to assert that God has made more than one world. For He is perfectly good, and deficient in no virtue whatsoever, least of all in those virtues that are associated with Justice and Friendship, which are the fairest of all virtues, and those most appropriate to the divine nature. And as God is not wanting in any respect, so also He possesses no redundant or superfluous characteristics. There must exist, therefore, other gods and other worlds than ours, whose companionship furnishes a sphere for the exercise of these