ur cardinal weaknesses.

First, it stands for "the unexamined life," as Plato called it. "The
unexamined life," he says, "is not liveable for a human being." A
man, who is a man, must cross-examine life, must make life face up
to him and yield its secrets. He must know what it means, the
significance of every relation of life--father and child, man and
wife, citizen and city, subject and king, man and the world--above
all, man and God. We must examine and know. But this old religion
stood by tradition and not reflection. There was no deep sense of
truth. Plutarch admired his father, and he describes, with warm
approval, how his father once said to a man: "That is a dangerous
question, not to be discussed at all--when you question the opinion
we hold about the gods, and ask reason and demonstration for
everything." Such an attitude means mistrust, it means at bottom a
fundamental unfaith. The house is beautiful; do not touch it; it is
riddled by white ants, by dry rot, and it would fall. That is not
faith; it is a strange confession; but all who hesitate at changes,
I think, make that confession sooner or later. There is a line of
Kabir which puts the essence of this: "Penance is not equal to
truth, nor is there any sin like untruth." This was one of the
essential weaknesses of that old religion--its fear, and the absence
of a deep sense of truth.

In the next place, there is no real association of morals with
religion. The old stories were full of the adventures of Jupiter, or
Zeus, with the heroines, mortal women, whom he loved. Of some 1900
wall paintings at Pompeii, examined by a German scholar and
antiquary, some 1400 represent mythological subjects, largely the
stories of the loves of Jupiter. The Latin dramatist Terence
pictures the young man looking at one of these paintings and saying
to himself, "If Jupiter did it, why should not I?" Centuries later
we find Augustine quoting that sentence. It has been said that few
things tended more strongly against morality than the stories of the
gods preserved by Homer and Hesiod. Plato loved Homer; so much the
more striking is his resolve that in his "Republic" there should be
no Homer. Men said: "Ah, but you don't understand; those stories are
allegories. They do not mean what they say; they mean something
deeper." But Plato said we must speak of God always as he is; we
must in no case tell lies about God "whether they are allegories or
whether they are not allegories.