Works of Lucian of Samosata — Volume 01 by Lucian of Samosata
page 28 of 366 (07%)
page 28 of 366 (07%)
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Providence has doomed to live on trust'; Lucian entirely refuses to
live on trust; he 'wants to know.' It was the wish of _Arthur Clennam_, who had in consequence a very bad name among the _Tite Barnacles_ and other persons in authority. Lucian has not escaped the same fate; 'the scoffer Lucian' has become as much a commonplace as '_fidus Achates_,' or 'the well-greaved Achaeans,' the reading of him has been discountenanced, and, if he has not actually lost his place at the table of Immortals, promised him when he temporarily left the Island of the Blest, it has not been so 'distinguished' a place as it was to have been and should have been. And all because he 'wanted to know.' His questions, of course, are not all put in the same manner. In the _Dialogues of the Gods_, for instance, the mark of interrogation is not writ large; they have almost the air at first of little stories in dialogue form, which might serve to instruct schoolboys in the attributes and legends of the gods--a manual charmingly done, yet a manual only. But we soon see that he has said to himself: Let us put the thing into plain natural prose, and see what it looks like with its glamour of poetry and reverence stripped off; the Gods do human things; why not represent them as human persons, and see what results? What did result was that henceforth any one who still believed in the pagan deities might at the cost of an hour's light reading satisfy himself that his gods were not gods, or, if they were, had no business to be. Whether many or few did so read and so satisfy themselves, we have no means of knowing; it is easy to over-estimate the effect such writing may have had, and to forget that those who were capable of being convinced by exposition of this sort would mostly be those who were already convinced without; still, so far as Lucian had any effect on the religious position, it must have been in discrediting paganism |
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