Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/45

 ready-made answers to questions on the nature of Vice and Virtue, and of the vices and the virtues, was composed as much of Philosophy as of Religion in the narrower sense of the term. The Theogonies of Homer and Hesiod furnished the external machinery of the supernatural world, but the moral utterances of these two poets, and not of these only, but of Simonides and Solon, of Theognis and the "Seven Sages," contained many striking lessons, and many emphatic warnings, touching the necessity and advantages of a life of virtue. It became, in fact, quite evident, though not, of course, explicitly asserted, or perhaps even consciously admitted, that the gods, as represented in the Homeric poems and as existing in the popular imagination, were quite impossible as a foundation for Morality, though surpassingly splendid as the material of Art. It is hardly too much to say that, after the establishment of the great philosophic schools in the fourth century, all the conscious inspiration to a life of Virtue, and all the consolations which it is the more usual function of Religion to administer, were supplied by Philosophy. Sudden conversions from Vice to Philosophy mark the history of the philosophic movement in Greece as religious movements have been marked among other peoples and in other periods. An edifying discourse under a Stoic Portico, or in an Academic School, has been as effective in its practical results as a religious oration by Bossuet, or a village preaching by Whitfield. Religion and Philosophy are*