two grains of truth in a bushel of falsehood. Now early life is very
impressible, and children ought not to learn what they will have to unlearn
when they grow up; we must therefore have a censorship of nursery tales,
banishing some and keeping others. Some of them are very improper, as we
may see in the great instances of Homer and Hesiod, who not only tell lies
but bad lies; stories about Uranus and Saturn, which are immoral as well as
false, and which should never be spoken of to young persons, or indeed at
all; or, if at all, then in a mystery, after the sacrifice, not of an
Eleusinian pig, but of some unprocurable animal. Shall our youth be
encouraged to beat their fathers by the example of Zeus, or our citizens be
incited to quarrel by hearing or seeing representations of strife among the
gods? Shall they listen to the narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother,
and of Zeus sending him flying for helping her when she was beaten? Such
tales may possibly have a mystical interpretation, but the young are
incapable of understanding allegory. If any one asks what tales are to be
allowed, we will answer that we are legislators and not book-makers; we
only lay down the principles according to which books are to be written; to
write them is the duty of others.

And our first principle is, that God must be represented as he is; not as
the author of all things, but of good only. We will not suffer the poets
to say that he is the steward of good and evil, or that he has two casks
full of destinies;--or that Athene and Zeus incited Pandarus to break the
treaty; or that God caused the sufferings of Niobe, or of Pelops, or the
Trojan war; or that he makes men sin when he wishes to destroy them.
Either these were not the actions of the gods, or God was just, and men
were the better for being punished. But that the deed was evil, and God
the author, is a wicked, suicidal fiction which we will allow no one, old
or young, to utter. This is our first and great principle--God is the
author of good only.