Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/132

 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. 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. 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. 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, 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