HELL AND THE DIVINE VERACITY 



503 



might summarily dispose, by observing that its 

 possessors are liable to Coleridge's censure — 

 they prefer Christianity to truth. But it will 

 serve our purpose to meet these objections on 

 their own ground, and to fight them with their 

 own weapons. Is it, then, quite certain tliat a 

 good Being, who on one or more occasions af- 

 firmed himself to have ordained Tophet, would 

 wish his affirmation to be always believed ? The 

 answer to this question may be sought in human 

 analogies. Malcolm, in order to test the fidelity 

 of Macduff, charged himself with grievous faults. 

 It was with hearty satisfaction that Macduff at 

 length discovered that Malcolm had been deceiv- 

 ing him. Nor can we doubt that, when the dis- 

 covery was made, his satisfaction was shared by 

 Malcolm himself; for the latter would prefer that 

 his friend should regard him as an occasional 

 liar, rather than as a perpetual villain. 1 A yet 

 closer parallel may be drawn from classical my- 

 thology. Mr. Symonds has well observed that 

 an enlightened pagan would feel about the can- 

 nibal repasts attributed to his gods much as an 

 enlightened Christian feels about eternal punish- 

 ment. This parallel (Mr. Symonds's critics not- 

 withstanding) holds perfectly ; for the analogical 

 device which is used to defend, and the allegori- 

 cal device which is used to explain away, the be- 

 lief in a divine torture-house, may just as readily 

 be applied to the belief in divine cannibalism. 

 It is, therefore, worth while to consider the sort 

 of language which devout but enlightened pa- 

 gans — pagan Broad Churchmen, in fact — held 

 concerning this unsavory dogma of pagan ortho- 

 doxy. In a passage translated and justly praised 

 by Bacon, Plutarch observes: "Surely, I had 

 rather a great deal men should say there was no 

 such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should 

 say that there was one Plutarch that would eat 

 his children as soon as they were born ; as the 

 poets speak of Saturn;" the gods, he infers, 

 have a similar preference, and hate superstition 

 worse than atheism. This principle is fruitful of 

 consequences. Let us suppose that Plutarch 



1 Perhaps a similar lesson may be gathered from 

 the Gospels. We may be sure that the father whose 

 son refused to go into the vineyard, but afterward 

 repented and went, was better pleased than if the son 

 had kept his word and not gone— had been more 

 truthful, but less obedient. The moral of Jephthah's 

 story is less satisfactory ; and the frantic efforts that 

 are nowadays made to explain away this simple nar- 

 rative—to make believe that Jephthah broke his vow 

 and did not commit murder— are among the many 

 proofs that the religious instinct of modern times is 

 in some respects healthier than that of the Old, and 

 seemingly of the New, Testament (Hebrews xi. 32). 



would have accepted them : in that case, if Kro- 

 nos or Zeus could have been shown to have 

 pleaded guilty to revolting cruelty, Plutarch 

 would have judged it right to disbelieve the 

 divine confession. And he might fairly have 

 hoped that such a judgment would find an echo 

 amid the peaks of Olympus ; for would not the 

 Olympian father more bitterly resent the charge 

 of murdering his own children than that of, hu- 

 manly speaking, either deceiving or being de- 

 ceived (KpelTTov 8'i\ecr9ai i|/«C5oj, $ aXrjdes Kaii6v) ? 

 Nay, further, Zeus was the father " of men " as 

 well as " of gods," the father whose " offspring 

 we are ;" x and the foregoing argument would as 

 clearly apply to his treatment of his human, as 

 to his treatment of his divine, children. Where- 

 fore Plutarch might have thought it not merely 

 unscientific, but irreligious, to doubt that — 



" As for the dog, the furies, and their snakes, 

 The gloomy caverns, and the burning lakes, 

 And all the vain infernal trumpery, 

 They neither are, nor were, nor e'er can be." 2 



In other words, he might have clung to his belief 

 in the divine mercy, even though the divine mer- 

 cy had to be upheld at the cost of lesser divine 

 attributes ; even though, with the voracity of 

 Tartarus, he gave up the veracity of Zeus. 



Another Neopagan has dealt with divine can- 

 nibalism in a manner whereon Neochristians 

 would do well to meditate. To Pindar it seemed 

 hardly credible that the gods should have eaten 

 up Pelops. He granted, indeed, that very strange 

 things sometimes happened ; and he thought that, 

 in this particular case, the final decision might 

 be reserved for posterity ; but, provisionally, he 

 deemed it safer to reject the story. It is remark- 

 able that here the poet uses the same sort of pru- 

 dential weapons that orthodox Christians use ; but 

 he uses it on the opposite side — he employs it in 

 defense, not of faith, but of skepticism. And this 

 should show us what a two-edged weapon it is. 

 Pindar, indeed, probably regarded the gods as 

 having been misrepresented, not as mirepresent- 

 ing themselves. But we have shown that, for prac- 

 tical purposes, these two forms of misrepresen- 

 tation differ less than at first sight appears ; and, 

 indeed, that the distinction between gods who mis- 

 report themselves, and gods who are misreported 

 by verbally inspired reporters, is a distinction 

 without a difference. But Pindar haply did not re- 

 gard the misreporters as verbally inspired. If so, 

 his view exactly foreshadowed that of the Neo- 

 christians ; and the state of mind common to both 

 bears so closely on our inquiry that we propose to 



1 Menander. s Lucretius translated by Dryden. 



