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    less than truth required ,, because they had been taught to believe and do much more than truth warranted . The people ridicule me as one insane , ' says a priest to Socrates ,

    • when I say anything in a , public assembly concerning the gods , although I do not predict to them anything which is not true . But indeed , he proceeds to insist , it is not fit to pay attention to them , but we shall still go on in our own way . ' *

    Plata then , in those ancient times , like Wesley in our own times , had to rouse minds deep sunk into the apathy and scorn of orthodoxies and scepticisms . And how did he effect this ? By appealing to the imagination and feelings of those who , he thought , were not to be moved sufficiently for his purpose by addressing their reasons more directly . And alas ! Plato , like Wesley , confounded truth and falsehood in the appeals he made to the imagination and feelings of his hearers .

    At the very time Plato is censuring the belief which the vulgar had derived from the mystical fables of Homer , instead of labouring to explain the hidden meaning of that hieroglyphic writing ; at the very time when Plato is protesting against the monstrousness of fables , which made the father of the gods put his sons to death ; which described a holy war in heaven itself ; which

    asserted an inhabitant of heaven to have been hurled down by the father of the gods ; and , lastly , which set forth the Deity appearing amongst men in material forms , —at the very time when Plato is ridiculing instead of explaining these errors of popular belief , f ^ * preparing to sanction with his authority other instances of that pious fraud which consists in blending truth with falsehood .

    If , ' he continues , ' we have reasoned right , and if , indeed , falsehood be unprofitable to the gods , but useful to man iri the way of a drug , it is plain that such a thing is to be intrusted only to the physician , but is not to be touched by private persons . It belongs , then , to the governors of the city , if to any other , to make a falsehood for the good of the city ; but none of the rest must venture on Buch a thing . '

    The divine philosopher , having thus consecrated again the principle of deception , which he nimself had just before desecrated with too bold a hand , instead of resolutely but reverently revealing the truth , proceeds to make it the corner-stone of his moral and political system . Some of the instances in which he

    proposes to deceive the people for their yoodj are , indeed , so ludicrous , and must have proved so impossible of execution , as to afford a reductio ad absurdum of the principle . Unfortunately , these unsound foundations were to be placed , not only under the Platonic abomination , a community of women , but under a belief * Euthyphran . f See the second book of the Republic .

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    The Diffusion of Knowledge amongst the People . 11

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 11, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/11/