ABSTRACT
Delivered on 5 May 1900, this is the first of the twenty-three papers that Strachey read to the three Cambridge discussion groups of which he was a member. Gabriel Merle, in the only published commentary on it, describes it as 'a parody of a sermon'. Strachey had never practised or accepted religion with anything more than a tepid formality when he was young. As an adolescent, his discovery of Plato confirmed his complete rejection of Christianity as a reasonable metaphysical or ethical system. The sages and the philosophers, the men of science and the men of law, the statesmen and the historians, who have lived upon the earth, what stores of knowledge and of wisdom have their labours accumulated together. The ancient manners of Greece and Rome, the mysterious civilisations of the East, the abandoned and barbarous institutions of primeval man, all lie before you in their profusion – inestimable treasures of the human race.
