Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/140

 the personification of the eternal forces of the world and of the laws which govern them, these laws and forces presented themselves to their minds in the forms which had been figured and described by the sculptors, painters, and writers of Greece. They accepted, without hesitation or dispute, the numbers and physical characteristics of the divine types of Greece. From end to end of the habitable earth, as the Greeks boasted, the gods of the Hellenic pantheon absorbed and assimilated all those of other nationalities; within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at least, its polytheism became a kind of universal religion for civilized humanity, and was adopted by nations of the most diverse origin and language. The lower classes alone, who read neither Homer nor Hesiod and were unable to admire the statues of the Greek sculptors, were kept free from the powerful and softening influence of poetry and art. They guarded with obstinacy the ancient foundations of their early faith, and in the void left by the disappearance of the national gods, their primitive beliefs seem to have put on a new life and to have enjoyed a restored prestige. Thus we may see, in forest clearings, the ancient but still vigorous stumps of great trees which have been felled send out fresh shoots to renew their youth.

This persistence, this apparent recrudescence of fetishism made itself felt in Egypt alone. It amazed and scandalized both pagans and Christians during the early centuries of Christianity. They mocked at a people who "hardly dared to bite a leek or an onion: who adored divinities which grew in their own gardens," and a god which was nothing but a "beast wallowing on a purple carpet." Guided by a more critical knowledge of the past, we are now better able to understand the origin of these beliefs and the secret of their long duration. We are enabled to account for them by that inexperience which falsifies all the judgments of infancy, in the race as well as in the individual; we see that they are the exaggeration of a natural sentiment, which becomes honourable and worthy of our sympathy when it is addressed to the useful and laborious helpers of man, to domestic animals, for instance, such as the cow and the draught ox.