heretics. His impeached article on The Interpretation of Scripture
might to-day be published by any clergyman. His crime lay in
saying that the Bible should be criticised like other books.

In his introduction to the Republic of Plato he expresses the same
thought:

A Greek in the age of Plato attached no importance to the question
whether his religion was an historical fact. ...Men only began to
suspect that the narratives of Homer and Hesiod were fictions when
they recognised them to be immoral. And so in all religions: the
consideration of their morality comes first, afterwards the truth
of the documents in which they are recorded, or of the events,
natural or supernatural, which are told of them. But in modern
times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than Catholic, we
have been too much inclined to identify the historical with the
moral; and some have refused to believe in religion at all, unless
a superhuman accuracy was discerned in every part of the record.
The facts of an ancient or religious history are amongst the most
important of all facts, but they are frequently uncertain, and we
only learn the true lesson which is to be gathered from them when
we place ourselves above them.

Some one writes in the Literary Supplement of the Times to-day,
11th December, 1919:

"An almost animal indifference to mental refinement characterises
our great public."

This is quite true, and presumably was true in Jowett's day, not