This
may be true of some of them, though surely not of the popular form of
the old Greek ethnic faith. Its deities were nothing better than the
passions of human nature projected upon ethereal heights, and
incarnated and made personal in undecaying demonic shapes,--not
conditioned and straitened like the bodies of man, but enjoying
perpetual youth and immunity from death in most cases, with permission
to take liberties with Space and Time greater even than are granted to
us by steam and telegraph-wires.
The vulgar Grecian polytheism was all material. It had no martyrs and
confessors. It was not worth dying for, as it was good for nothing to
live by. The religion of Hellas was the religion of sensualistic beauty
simply. It was just the worship for Pheidias and Praxiteles, for the
bard of Teos and the soft Catullus, for sensual poet, painter, and
sculptor. But "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," although we
gather most of our knowledge of Olympus and the Olympians from his
verse, was worthy of a loftier and purer heaven than the low one under
which he wandered from city to city, singing the tale of Troy divine,
and hymns and paeans to the gods. The good and the true were mere
metaphysical abstractions to the old Greek.
Pages:
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26