Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/36

4 of horrible banquets to which the more fastidious faith of the lyric poet refuses to give credence, he bids all to follow after justice, because the gods spend their time, not in feasting, but in watching the ways and works of men. If Æschylos in one drama depicts the arrogant tyranny of Zeus as an upstart and usurper, if the reiterated conviction of the prophetic Titan is that the new god shall fall, yet in others he looks up to the same Zeus (if indeed it be the same), as the avenger of successful wrong, the vindicator of a righteous law whose power and goodness are alike eternal. If for Sophokles the old mythology had not lost its charm, if he too might tell of the lawless loves and the wild licence of Zeus and other gods, yet his heart is fixed on higher realities, on that purity of word and deed which has its birth, not on earth, but in heaven, and of which the imperishable law is realised and consummated in a God as holy and everlasting.

It would be difficult to discover a more marvellous combination of seemingly inexplicable contradictions, of belief in the history of gods utterly distinct from the faith which guided the practice of men, of an immoral and impure theology with a condition of society which it would be monstrous to regard as utterly and brutally depraved. Yet, in some way or other, this repulsive system, from which heathen poets and philosophers learnt gradually to shrink scarcely less than ourselves, had come into being, had been systematised into a scheme more or less coherent, and imposed upon the people as so much genuine history. What this origin and growth was, is (strange as it may appear) one of the most momentous questions which we can put to ourselves, for on its answer must depend our conclusions on the conditions of human life during the infancy of mankind. Of the answers which have been given to this question, it can be no light matter to determine which furnishes the most adequate solution.

Two theories only appear to attempt a philosophical analysis of this vast system. While one repudiates the imputation of a deliberate