" Plato, like every real thinker,
sees that this pretence of allegory is a sham. The story did its
mischief whether it was allegory or not; it stood between man and
God, and headed men on to wrong lines, turned men away from the
moral standard.

There was more. Every year, as we saw, men went to be initiated into
the rites of Demeter at Eleusis, a few miles from Athens. And we
read how one of the great Athenian orators, Lysias, went there and
took with him to be initiated a harlot, with whom he was living, and
the woman's proprietress--a squalid party; and they were initiated.
Their morals made no difference; the priests and the goddesses
offered no objection. In the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth there
were women slaves dedicated to the goddess, who owned them, and who
received the wages of their shame. With what voice could religion
speak for morality in Corinth? At Comana in Syria (we read in Strabo
the geographer, about the time of Christ) there was a temple where
there were six thousand of these temple slaves. I say again, that is
the unexamined life. God and goddess have nothing to say about some
of the most sacred relations in life. God, goddess, priest,
worshipper, never gave a thought to these poor creatures, dedicated,
not by themselves, to this awful life--human natures with the
craving of the real woman for husband and child, for the love of
home, but never to know it. That was associated with religion; that
was religion. There was always a minimum of protest from the Greek
temples against wrong or for right. It is remarked, again and again,
that all the great lessons came, not from the temples, not from the
priests, but from the poets and philosophers, from the thinkers in
revolt against the religion of their people. Curiously enough, even
in Homer himself, it is plain that the heroes, the men, are on a
higher moral plane than the gods; and all through Greek history the
gods are a drag on morality. What a weakness in religion! The sense
of wrong and right is innate in man; it may be undeveloped, or it
may be deadened, but it is instinctive; and a religion which does
not know it, or which finds the difference between right and wrong
to lie in matters of taboo or ceremonial defilement, cannot speak to
one of the deepest needs of the human heart, the need of
forgiveness. There is no righteousness, in the long run, about these
gods.

In the third place, the religion has the common weakness of all
polytheism