Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/314

 base. But the mass of men, though they also must have seen, were little troubled, it would seem, either to demolish or to repair. They accepted the old beliefs and ceremonies because they were sanctioned by the authority or the experience of past ages; and if sober reasoning and criticism exposed flaws and inconsistencies therein, what matter? They were, as they still are, a people incapable of any mental equilibrium; the mood of the hour swayed them now to emotions, now to reasonings; they did not cultivate consistency; they could not sit still and preserve an even balance between the passions of the heart and the judgements of the intellect, but threw their whole selves into the one scale, and the other for the moment was as vanity.

In the whole complex and irrational scheme of religion thus accepted, nothing was more highly valued than the means by which divine counsel was obtained for the conduct both of public and of private affairs. Omens were regularly taken before battle, at the critical moment when we should prefer to trust experience and generalship. Oracles were consulted as to the sites for planting colonies, in cases where a surveyor's report might have seemed more decisive. But the efficacy of these old methods of consulting the gods went almost unchallenged. It seems seldom to have occurred to men's minds that those untoward signs in the victim's entrails, which perhaps delayed tactics on which victory depended, were the symptoms of an internal disease and not the handiwork of a deity, or that the inferior and ambiguous verse, in which the gods condescended to give counsel, more often confused than confirmed human judgement. Even of the philosophers, according to Cicero, two only, Xenophanes and Epicurus, went so far as to deny the validity of all means of communion; and Socrates, for all his questioning and testing of truth, obeyed without question the whispered warnings of a daemon, and in deference to the ambiguous exhortations of a vision spent some of his last days in turning Aesop's fables into verse, that so he might go into the presence of the gods with his conscience clear. Thus, though men no longer expected to look upon the faces or to hear the voices of the gods, they still felt them to be close at hand, easy of access, ready to counsel, to warn, to encourage; and the methods of communion, in proportion as they stand condemned by reason, commend so