III.  The Laws rest on a religious foundation; in this respect they bear the stamp of primitive legislation.  They do not escape the almost inevitable consequence of making irreligion penal.  If laws are based upon religion, the greatest offence against them must be irreligion.  Hence the necessity for what in modern language, and according to a distinction which Plato would scarcely have understood, might be termed persecution.  But the spirit of persecution in Plato, unlike that of modern religious bodies, arises out of the desire to enforce a true and simple form of religion, and is directed against the superstitions which tend to degrade mankind.  Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, is in favour of tolerating all except the intolerant, though he would not promote to high offices those who disbelieved in the immortality of the soul.  Plato has not advanced quite so far as this 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