"Another Englishman, being very partial to tobacco and to smoking, will have a natural bent towards the High Church, in which much incense is burnt and much smoke produced.
"Another, being very methodical and punctilious, will regard Methodism with much sympathy.
"A fourth, being afflicted with great susceptibility to moral shocks, goes among the Quakers.
"In that way I began to feel my way through the maze of their religions. The strangest thing, however, was that all these multifarious believers staunchly maintained that they took their divergent creeds from one and the same book: from the Bible. In that respect they reminded me of my whilom adversaries at Athens, the Sophists, who could prove the pro and con of any given assertion with equal volubility.
"In order to imbue myself fully with the spirit of their beliefs, I frequently went to church on Sundays.
"To be quite frank, I do not very well see why in England they call that day a Sunday. There is no sun in it, and otherwise it resembles night more than anything else. It ought to be called Un-day. I concluded that everything arranged for that day was done in order to bring out its resemblance to night ever so strongly. Thus, lest people should forego sleep on that drowsy day, the people of England have introduced thousands of soporifics in the shape of sermons. What other use that drug may have I could never see.
"To me as an old Hellene it seemed a thing quite beyond comprehension, why people should go out of their way to salary a person for making them feel creepy at the same place, and on the same day of the week, by repeating the same admonitions in nearly the same words hundreds of times a year. Evidently their lives on the other days of the week are so spiritless, dull and dry, that they want to get at least on Sundays some moral hair-friction with spiritual eau de Cologne. We Hellenes never thought of doing such things. It would have struck us as a personal insult to suppose that we needed such perpetual moralisation at stated times.
"Hippocrates told me that some constitutions do need the constant use of purgative waters. But do all people suffer from ethical constipation?
"I could not help smiling at the idea of my preaching like that to the Athenians of my time. They would have handed me the goblet with hemlock long before they did do it. Each householder would have considered my pretensions to moralise them as a slander on his private life. Each of them tried to make his own house a chapel full of constantly practised piety, dutifulness, and humanity. What need had he of my sermons? When he joined the great festivals of the city, it was to do his duty by the other Athenians, just as he joined the army on land, or the navy on sea, for the same purpose.
"We knew of no dogmas. We did not think that a man need stake all his soul on the belief in certain abstract dogmas. If he did not feel inclined to linger on one story told of Zeus, he might lovingly dwell on any other of the numberless stories told of him. If some said that Zeus was born in Crete, others maintained that he was born elsewhere. It seemed to us immaterial whether this fact or that was or was not historically exact.