his in the path of toleration. But
in judging of his enlightenment, we must remember that the evils of
necromancy and divination were far greater than those of intolerance in
the ancient world. Human nature is always having recourse to the first;
but only when organized into some form of priesthood falls into the
other; although in primitive as in later ages the institution of a
priesthood may claim probably to be an advance on some form of religion
which preceded. The Laws would have rested on a sounder foundation, if
Plato had ever distinctly realized to his mind the difference between
crime and sin or vice. Of this, as of many other controversies, a clear
definition might have been the end. But such a definition belongs to a
later age of philosophy.

The arguments which Plato uses for the being of a God, have an extremely
modern character: first, the consensus gentium; secondly, the argument
which has already been adduced in the Phaedrus, of the priority of the
self-moved. The answer to those who say that God 'cares not,' is, that
He governs by general laws; and that he who takes care of the great
will assuredly take care of the small. Plato did not feel, and has not
attempted to consider, the difficulty of reconciling the special with
the general providence of God. Yet he is on the road to a solution, when
he regards the world as a whole, of which all the parts work together
towards the final end.

We are surprised to find that the scepticism, which we attribute to
young men in our own day, existed then (compare Republic); that the
Epicureanism expressed in the line of Horace (borrowed from Lucretius)--

'Namque Deos didici securum agere aevum,'

was already prevalent in the age of Plato; and that the terrors of
another world were freely used in order to gain advantages over other
men in this. The same objection which struck the Psalmist--'when I saw
the prosperity of the wicked'--is supposed to lie at the root of the
better sort of unbelief. And the answer is substantially the same which
the modern theologian would offer:--that the ways of God in this world
cannot be justified unless there be a future state of rewards and
punishments. Yet this future state of rewards and punishments is in
Plato's view not any addition of happiness or suffering imposed from
without, but the permanence of good and evil in the soul: here he is in
advance of many modern theologians. The Greek, too, had his difficulty
about the exis