Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/147

 with his own reasonings on this point; they are, as Wyttenbach says, acutius quam verius dicta: the punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers clearly leaves the advantage, so far as concerns this world, on the side of the transgressors. Plutarch, with his firmly pious belief in the justice and goodness of God, feels driven to assert that the balance must be redressed somewhere, and he invokes the aid of Myth to carry him, in this case, whither Reason refuses to go; and taking the myth as a whole, and in relation to the tract in which it is embodied, we cannot doubt that its object is to enforce that doctrine of rewards and punishments in the Hereafter, from which Plutarch, as we have seen, shrinks when an occasion arises for pressing it from the standpoint of Reason. The punishments which Thespesius has witnessed in his visit to the Afterworld have the effect of turning him into a righteous man in this world, and Plutarch clearly hopes that the story will likewise convince those who are not convinced by his reasons. We may gather, however, that inclined as he was to believe that the providence of God extended into the Afterworld, his attitude, as fixed by reason and probability, is summed up in the words already referred to—"Such rewards or punishments as the soul receives for the actions of its previous career are nothing to us who are yet alive, being disregarded or disbelieved." But whatever may be the*