Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/24

 also the literature in which their thoughts and doings are recorded. For religion with them was not a single and separate department of their civilisation, not an avocation from the ordinary pursuits of men, but rather a spirit with which work and holiday, gaiety and gloom, were alike penetrated. We should be misled by the modern devotion to dogma and definite formulae of faith, were we to think that so vague a religion as Greek polytheism was any the less an abiding force, any the less capable of inspiring genuine enthusiasm and reverence. It is not hard to imagine the worshipper animated for the time by one emotion only, his mind void of all else and flooded with the one idea incarnate in the divine being at whose altar he sat in supplication. It is impossible really to misdoubt the strength and the depth of Greek religious sentiment, however multifarious and even mutually contradictory its modes of display. A nation who peopled sky and earth and sea with godlike forms; who saw in every stream and glen and mountain-top its own haunting, hallowing presence, and, ill-content that nature alone should do them honour, sought out the loveliest hills and vales in all their lovely land to dedicate there the choicest of their art; who consecrated with lavish love bronze and marble, ivory and gold, all the best that wealth could win and skill adorn, in honour of the beings that were above man yet always with him, majestic as Zeus, joyous as Dionysus, grave as Demeter, light as Aphrodite, yet all divine; such a nation, though it knew nought of inspired books and formulated creeds, can be convicted of no shortcoming in real piety and devotion.

Their gods were very near to those whom they favoured; no communion or intercourse was beyond hope of attainment; gods fought in men's battles, guided men's wanderings, dined at men's boards, and took to themselves mortal consorts; and when men grew degenerate and the race of heroes was no more, gods still held speech with them in oracles. Religious hopes, religious fears, were the dominant motive of the people's whole life. It was in religion that sculpture found its inspiration, and its highest achievements were in pourtraying deities. The theatre was a religious institution, and on the stage, without detriment to reverence, figured the Eumenides themselves. Religious duties were excuse enough for Sparta to hang back from defending the freedom of Greece. Religious scruples set enlightened Athens