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234 religion, like most other ancient cults, took no small delight in spite of the reforming voice of an Isaiah. It is better, however, to abide on the safer ground of confronting one Aryan religion with another; and in this instance one may contrast the direction which progress took in the theology of our ancestors with that which it followed in Greece and Italy, where Zeus or Jove, etherealized and expanded like his namesake the heavens, was able to hold his own, though it must be confessed that he came near having a formidable rival, not in any one of the older divinities, but in Heracles, a god whom Greek theology regarded as by birth a mortal. In this matter at least, Celts, Teutons and Hindus take a respectable position in the comparison with Greeks and Romans, when, unlike the latter, some of them proceeded to raise to the highest seat in their pantheon the representative of the intellectual aspect of man's nature, and the exponent, however narrow and inadequate, of the striving of human reason to conquer all things and surmount all difficulties by dint of genius and persistent effort.