l in strength to
the belief in another life. Yet about these too we must ask What will of
God? how revealed to us, and by what proofs? Religion, like happiness,
is a word which has great influence apart from any consideration of its
content: it may be for great good or for great evil. But true religion
is the synthesis of religion and morality, beginning with divine
perfection in which all human perfection is embodied. It moves among
ideas of holiness, justice, love, wisdom, truth; these are to God, in
whom they are personified, what the Platonic ideas are to the idea of
good. It is the consciousness of the will of God that all men should
be as he is. It lives in this world and is known to us only through
the phenomena of this world, but it extends to worlds beyond. Ordinary
religion which is alloyed with motives of this world may easily be
in excess, may be fanatical, may be interested, may be the mask of
ambition, may be perverted in a thousand ways. But of that religion
which combines the will of God with our highest ideas of truth and right
there can never be too much. This impossibility of excess is the note of
divine moderation.

So then, having briefly passed in review the various principles of moral
philosophy, we may now arrange our goods in order, though, like the
reader of the Philebus, we have a difficulty in distinguishing the
different aspects of them from one another, or defining the point at
which the human passes into the divine.

First, the eternal will of God in this world and in another,--justice,
holiness, wisdom, love, without succession of acts (ouch e genesis
prosestin), which is known to us in part only, and reverenced by us as
divine perfection.

Secondly, human perfection, or the fulfilment of the will of God in
this world, and co-operation with his laws revealed to us by reason and
experience, in nature, history, and in our own minds.

Thirdly, the elements of human perfection,--virtue, knowledge, and right
opinion.

Fourthly, the external conditions of perfection,--health and the goods
of life.

Fifthly, beauty and happiness,--the inward enjoyment of that which is
best and fairest in this world and in the human soul.

...

The Philebus is probably the latest in time of the writings of Plato
with the exception of the Laws. We have in it therefore the last
development of his philosophy. The extreme and one-sided doctrines of
the Cynics and Cyrenaics are included in a larger whole; t