And here also the priest of the Pythian Apollo was once more compelled to accommodate himself to the sad changes of his time. The priestess still sat on the tripod; the sacred fumes still rose out of the earth; the seeress was still beset by curious questioners, and the fountains of the oracle still continued to flow. But how different was the nature of the questions which the contemporaries of Plutarch addressed to the deity! Not war or peace between nation and nation, not rupture or alliance between state and state, as in former days, now demanded its solution. It was what should be eaten, drunk, sown, or harvested; what the deity thought of a nuptial, of the portion set apart for a son or daughter! Such were the things that tempted the curiosity of the oracle-seekers; and to answer them no longer in poetry, but in homely prose, had become the trivial duty of the sanctuary. And yet the magnificence of the gifts and endowments had of late rather increased than fallen off.
"Like the trees," exultingly exclaims Plutarch, "whose vigorous sap shoots forth continually new sprouts, so grows the Pylum of Delphi, and extends day by day in the number of its chapels, consecrated water-fonts, and assembly halls, which rise in a splendor unknown for years. Apollo has saved us from neglect and misery to overwhelm us with wealth, honors, and splendors; it is impossible that such a revolution should have been caused by human agencies without divine intervention; it is he who has come to bestow his blessing on the oracle."
But not even Plutarch could disguise to himself the sad fact that the worship of the oracle had by no means kept pace with the progress of superstitious faith. Still, while the heathen deities had multiplied to an extent which led Pliny to declare that the gods in Olympus outnumbered the men on earth; while the number of secret and public sects steadily increased in the east and west; while all the abominations of a misdirected religious instinct in both worlds united as in one common sewer at Rome, when Tacitus said that among the rising sects the one prospered most which proclaimed not only a new god, but a new license for all who were oppressed and poor; while all this was going on, the higher classes of society, the flower of the intellect of the heathen world, had repudiated the superstitions of the masses, partly to deny the existence of the gods, and partly to adopt strange and exclusive mysteries.
"This estrangement from the gods," exclaims Plutarch, "may be divided into two streams: the one seeks a bed in those hearts which resemble a rocky soil, where every thing of a divine nature is rejected; the other waters gentle souls like a porous soil with exactly opposite effects, producing there an exaggerated and superstitious fear of the gods."
Against both these illusions Plutarch protests in a whole series of works, and the manner in which he does it exhibits the best side of his character. "It is so sweet," he assures us, "to believe;" and we also readily believe him when he describes the feelings with which he witnesses the solemnities of divine worship.
"The unbeliever," he says, "sees in prayer only an unmeaning formula, in sacrifices only the slaughter of helpless animals; but the devout feels his soul elevated, the heart relieved of sorrow and pain."
He implores a pious and child-like reverence for the faith of his forefathers; it was these gods who have made Greece great, protected it in good and evil seasons; and those who will not pray to them from their inmost hearts, should at least suffer others to enjoy their peace of mind and happy simplicity. They should imitate the Egyptian priest, who, when too closely questioned by Herodotus, placed his finger upon his lips in mysterious silence. He thinks it shows little delicacy in the Stoics and Epicureans to attempt to represent the gods as merely another name for the elementary forces. Those who mistake fire, water, air, etc., for the gods, accept the sails, ropes, and anchor of a vessel for the pilot, the wholesome drug for the physician, and the threads of the web for the weaver.
"You destroy," says he to the Epicureans, "the foundations of society; you murder the holiest instincts of the human soul." To the Stoics he says,
"Why attack what is universally accepted? why destroy the religious idea which each people has inherited in the nature of its gods? You ask, above all things, proofs, reasons, and explanations? Beware! If you bring the spirit of doubt to every altar, nothing will be sacred. Every people has its own faith. That faith, transmitted for centuries, must suffice; its very age proves its divine origin; our duty is to hand it down to posterity, without stain or change, pure and unalloyed."