disciples' money. Each of his abstractions seemed to them a discovery, each of his metaphors a revelation. The myths of the great dialogues, and, above all, the fanciful machinery of the Timæus, interpreted with an incredible literalness and naive earnestness, such as only Biblical exegesis can rival, formed the starting point of the new revelation. The method and insight thus obtained were then employed in filling the lacunæ of the system and spreading its wings wider and wider, until a prodigious hierarchy of supernatural existences had been invented, from which the natural world was made to depend as a last link and lowest emanation.

The baselessness and elaboration of this theology were, of course, far from being obstacles to its success in such an age. On the contrary, the less evidence could be found in common experience for what a man appeared to know, the more deeply, people inferred, must he be versed in supernatural lore, and the greater, accordingly, was his authority. Nor was the spell of personal genius and even holiness wanting in the leaders of the new philosophy to lend it colour and persuasiveness with the many, to whom metaphysical conceptions are less impressive than is an eloquent personality, or a reputation for miraculous powers. Plotinus, to speak only of the greatest of the sect, had, in fact, a notable success in his day. His lectures at Rome, we are told, were attended by all the fashion and intellect of the capital; and his large and systematic thought, his subtlety and precision, his comparatively sober eloquence, and his assurance, if we may say so, in treading the clouds, have made him at all times a great authority with those persons who look in philosophy rather for impressive results than for solid foundations. His contemporaries were eminently persons of that type. A hungry man, when you bring him bread, does not stop to make scrupulous inquiries about the mill or the oven from which you bring it.

But the trouble was that the bread of Plotinus was a stone. The heart cannot feed on thin and elaborate abstractions, irrelevant to its needs and divorced from the natural objects of its interest. Men will often accept the baldest fictions as truths; but it is impossible for them to give a human meaning to vacuous conceptions, or to grow to love the categories of logic, interweaving their image with the actions and emotions of daily life. Religion must spring from the people; it must draw its form from tradition and its substance from the national imagination and conscience. Neo-Platonism drew both form and substance from a system of abstract thought. Its gods were still-born, being generated by logical dichotomy. Only in the 

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