Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/281

Rh great moments of life—its harmonies or discords. This seems to me to constitute their immortal value. They give also a kind of graduated scale of the popular culture or view of life, from one age to another, and this is of great importance.

I can see that the conception which the Greeks had of the Divinity did not reach to the highest requirements of humanity, from the very forms of their gods. Minerva, Juno, Venus, are cold beauties, without sympathy for humanity, and Father Jupiter, with his low forehead and the bushy wig, is a respectable Pacha of confined intellect, but as different to the ideal of the Father as presented glorified in Christ, as heaven is from earth. And when it is said that a man died happy if he could only for once behold the countenance of the Olympian Jove, as presented in the statue by Phidias in Elis, it must have been said as a compliment to the sculptor, or the Greeks' claim to happiness was not great. The Apollo of the Vatican alone, seems to me so beautiful and noble, that I rejoice that such a form does not move upon the earth, because, in that case, people might be tempted to idolatry. How far these gods fall short of being moral ideals, is proved by the traditions of their actions. One need only recall those of Apollo and Hermes, Minerva and Arachne, and the love stories of Jupiter!——And they well know it, the later great teachers, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. Their conception of the Divine was of a much higher standard.

But I will now, speak of that which I have lately seen—on the earth; first in the churches, these