Plato therefore rejects the more tragical mode of mythologizing of the
ancient poets, who thought proper to establish an arcane theology
respecting the gods, and on this account devised wanderings, castrations,
battles and lacerations of the gods, and many other such symbols of the
truth about divine natures which this theology conceals;--this mode he
rejects, and asserts that it is in every respect most foreign from
erudition. But he considers those mythological discourses about the gods
as more persuasive and more adapted to truth, which assert that a divine
nature is the cause of all good, but of no evil, and that it is void of
all mutation, comprehending in itself the fountain of truth, but never
becoming the cause of any deception to others. For such types of theology
Socrates delivers in the Republic.

All the fables therefore of Plato guarding the truth in concealment,
have not even their externally apparent apparatus discordant with our
undisciplined and unperverted anticipations of divinity. But they bring
with them an image of the mundane composition in which both the apparent
beauty is worthy of divinity, and a beauty more divine than this is
established in the unapparent lives and powers of its causes.

In the next place, that the reader may see whence and from what dialogues
principally the theological dogmas of Plato may be collected, I shall
present him with the following translation of what Proclus has admirably
written on this subject.

"The truth (says he) concerning the gods pervades, as I may say, through
all the Platonic dialogues, and in all of them conceptions of the first
philosophy, venerable, clear, and supernatural, are disseminated, in some
more obscurely, but in others more conspicuously;--conceptions which
excite those that are in any respect able to partake of them, to the