The Works of Lucian of Samosata, Vol. 4

of it—some important, some trivial—which are sure to occur in a detached way to readers of Lucian.

The Greco-Roman world was as settled and peaceful, as conscious of its imperial responsibilities, as susceptible to boredom, as greedy for amusement, as able to show a numerous leisured class, and as firm in its belief in money, as our own. What is more important for our purpose, it was questioning the truth of its religion just as we are today questioning the truth of ours. Lucian was the most vehement of these questioners. Of what played the role then that the Christian religion plays now, the pagan religion was only one half; the other half was philosophy. The gods of Olympus had long lost their hold upon the educated, though perhaps not upon the masses. The educated, feeling ill-content to be without any guide through the maze of life, had turned to philosophy instead. Stoicism was the prevalent creed, and how noble a form this could take in a cultivated and virtuous mind can be seen in the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius.

...Now, as then, we can find mystical philosophers trying to evolve a satisfactory creed by some process of logical trickery out of theosophical nonsense; and amiable and intelligent persons laboring hard to prove that the old mythology could be forced to accept a rationalistic interpretation—whether in regard to the inspection of animal entrails or prayers for fine weather; and philosophers framing systems of morality entirely apart from the ancient creeds, and sufficiently satisfactory to themselves, while hopelessly incapable of impressing the popular mind; and politicians, conscious that the basis of social order was being sapped by the decay of the faith in which it had arisen, and therefore attempting the impossible task of galvanizing dead creeds into a semblance of vitality; and strange superstitions creeping out of their hiding-places, and gaining influence in a luxurious society whose intelligence was an ineffectual safeguard against the most grovelling errors; and a dogged adherence by formalists and conservatives to ancient ways, and much empty profession of barren orthodoxy; and, beneath all, a vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind." — The Religion of All Sensible Men, in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.