Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/226

 with. These Astronomical Allegorists maintained that Osiris is the Lunar World and Typhon the Solar: the Moon's light being regarded as favourable to the reproductiveness of plants and animals, from its greater moistening tendency, while the light of the Sun is parching, and so hostile to life and vegetation that "a considerable portion of the earth is rendered by his heat totally uninhabitable." After a brief description of another class of astronomical Allegorists who regard the myth as an enigmatical description of Eclipses, he puts the whole of these particular explanations of the Physical and Astronomical Allegorists in their proper place as merely partial and distorted expressions of the ancient and universal belief in the existence of two opposing principles, two mutually hostile influences which operate throughout the universe, giving Nature its mixed and uncertain and fluctuating character. One of the most conspicuous features in Plutarch's Theology, as already examined in these pages, is his anxiety to avoid any kind of Dualism in his conception of Deity; and it is a necessary corollary of his religious and philosophical conviction on this point that there should be no place in the constitution of the world for a Being regarded as a coequal rival to the One Supreme Omnipotence. As Plutarch, however, himself points out, if nothing can be conceived as originating without a cause, and Good cannot be regarded as