Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

458 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH ANDclone towards producing a corresponding unity ofdoctrine, and a society sustaining and propagatingit.If, then, we take our stand at the moment whenClaudius began to reign, and count a century backwards,it is impossible to mention a time whenphilosophy was more impotent for good, and whenthe higher classes of the Roman empire were morethoroughly irreligious and unbelieving. To under-and the reason of this we must take into accounfirst the negative and then the positive action ofphilosophy up to that time. As to the former,there can be no doubt that the effect of philosophyin all its schools and through all its shades cthought had been hostile to a simple belief in polytheismand its mythology. Human reason hadbeen turned with pitiless severity on its mass offables, its discreditable stories, its manifold contradictions.As early as the sixth century beforeChrist it had used the key of allegory in order toinfuse into these some better meaning, and thiswas carried out into full detail by Metrodorus, afollower of Anaxagoras. Thus if Homer, the mirrorin which the Greek saw his religion reflected,described Jupiter as suspending Juno between heavenand earth, Heracleitus was indignant with theatheists who did not see that it meant how theworld and the elements were formed.41 Bv thisprocess indecent personal agencies melted away41 Dollinger, p, 254.