Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/391

 ABSENCE OF SCEPTICAL SPIRIT. 373 into a fetish worship was much more coinnion ainoni^ the ear- nest men of the West than amon<^ the more casy-goin<^ Chris- tians of the East. Probably the Greek could never hate idol-worship with the same amount of hatred as the Jew or the Western Christian, and mainly for the reason that lie never realized how com- pletely some races can fall into it. To St. Paul idol worship was devil worship. To our fathers, when they had once come to see that the articles were spurious, relic worship was idola- try. ]]ut the Greeks, both of the time of St. Paul and their representatives of the Middle Ages, regarded the creations of Greek art and the relics of the saints rather as symbols than as objects of reverence, and, speaking generally, were never in danger of converting the worship or respect due to the person or thing symbolized into fetish worship. Just as the men of the West had transferred much of their ancient hea- thenism into the ceremonies and practices of the media3val Church, so the Greeks had allowed their Christianity to be- come saturated with the ideas of old Greek religion. AVliile there were probably gross and material views taken of the Olympic gods and of the other deities recognized by the an- cient Greeks, it is doubtful whether there existed among them, to an}^ considerable extent, statue, picture, or relic worship in the modern sense of the term. Asiatics might venerate a stone which had fallen from Jupiter, but such worship was alien to the Greek spirit. But, even while remembering these facts, any one who is acquainted with the contemporary writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is forced to recognize that even in the East, in religious matters, the spirit of inquiry can scarcely be said to have existed. For many years afterwards scepticism was unknown even in historical or geographical matters. The wonderful stories told by our early geographers are often scarcely more childish than those re- lated by our early historians. When a man of genius and learning, like Milton, writing a century after the Ileforma- tion, and contemplating even a reform of reformation itself, could yet accept the fables concerning English history which he has transmitted to us, we may well cease to wonder at the