Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/46

 identified, because both are identical with Morality; the lives of some Greek Philosophers furnish the nearest parallel attained in antiquity to the modern ideal of saintliness.

This application of Philosophy to the spiritual requirements of the individual man, this independence of supernatural sanctions for goodness, was aided by the almost purely liturgical character of the Greek Religion. Greek Religion made no special appeal to the individual conscience with a view to awakening that sense of personal responsibility for every part of one's life and conduct which is the very soul and centre of Religion as understood in modern days. To attend the traditional religious festivals; to fulfil the rites prescribed for certain occasions by the sacerdotal laymen who represented the State on its religious side; to hold a vague conventional notion respecting the existence of the gods and of their separate personalities; to listen quietly, and respond reverently, while the purple-robed, myrtle-crowned, altar-ministrant intoned with solemn resonance the ancient formulæ embalming the sacred legends of some deity whose "Mysteries" were specially fostered and honoured by the State; to aid in giving effect to the dreadful imprecations pronounced against those guilty of sacrilege or parricide; to respond, in a word, to all the external demands of

Valerius Maximus (vi. 6. 15), and by Lucian in his dramatic version in the Bis Accusatus (16, 17). Philostratus—Lives of the Sophists, i. 20—gives an intensely modern account of the conversion of the sophist Isæus. (See also Note on p. 28.)]
 * [Footnote: the story are given in practically the same form by Diogenes Laertius,