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 existence of evil, which in one solitary passage, remarkable for being inconsistent with his general system, Plato explains, after the Magian fashion, by a good and evil spirit (compare Theaet., Statesman).  This passage is also remarkable for being at variance with the general optimism of the Tenth Book—­not ‘all things are ordered by God for the best,’ but some things by a good, others by an evil spirit.

The Tenth Book of the Laws presents a picture of the state of belief among the Greeks singularly like that of the world in which we live.  Plato is disposed to attribute the incredulity of his own age to several causes.  First, to the bad effect of mythological tales, of which he retains his disapproval; but he has a weak side for antiquity, and is unwilling, as in the Republic, wholly to proscribe them.  Secondly, he remarks the self-conceit of a newly-fledged generation of philosophers, who declare that the sun, moon, and stars, are earth and stones only; and who also maintain that the Gods are made by the laws of the state.  Thirdly, he notes a confusion in the minds of men arising out of their misinterpretation of the appearances of the world around them:  they do not always see the righteous rewarded and the wicked punished.  So in modern times there are some whose infidelity has arisen from doubts about the inspiration of ancient writings; others who have been made unbelievers by physical science, or again by the seemingly political character of religion; while there is a third class to whose minds the difficulty of ’justifying the ways of God to man’ has been the chief stumblingblock.  Plato is very much out of temper at the impiety of some of his contemporaries; yet he is determined to reason with the victims, as he regards them, of these illusions before he punishes them.  His answer to the unbelievers is twofold:  first, that the soul is prior to the body; secondly, that the ruler of the universe being perfect has made all things with a view to their perfection.  The difficulties arising out of ancient sacred writings were far less serious in the age of Plato than in our own.

We too have our popular Epicureanism, which would allow the world to go on as if there were no God.  When the belief in Him, whether of ancient or modern times, begins to fade away, men relegate Him, either in theory or practice, into a distant heaven.  They do not like expressly to deny God when it is more convenient to forget Him; and so the theory of the Epicurean becomes the practice of mankind in general.  Nor can we be said to be free from that which Plato