his god of battle. But when he turned inward to the domestic hearth, he was equally impressed with the divineness of a contrary scene, and he signified his reverence for the life of the family altar by placing it under the patronage of Hestia. He bowed before the serious aspects of nature; he deified the power that forged the thunderbolt. But he had equally a place of reverence for the pleasure-hour; he had his god of wine as well as of fire. He had a seat in his Pantheon for the god who directs the prosaic courts of law; but he had an equal throne for the god who stimulates the poetic flights of eloquence. He recognised a presiding divinity over the incipient movements of life, and crowned Demëtër as the fosterer of the grain. Yet, singularly enough, he had a temple also dedicated to the movelessness of death; and he was not afraid to assign a divinity to those very precincts of the grave which he himself so utterly loathed.1

The reader will be impressed with the fact that we have here a very remarkable and a very unique kind of optimism. In its usual form optimism says, "We believe that it will be all right in the long-run, though it is dark now." The Greek religion says, "We know nothing about the long-run; but it is all right now." The long-run was to the Greek an invisible

1 Whoever wishes to study the subsequent symbolism grafted upon these divinities may consult Sir G. W. Cox, 'Mythology of the Aryan Nations.'

quantity, and he had no sympathy with the invisible.1 The limit to his sympathy was the boundary-line bętween the seen and the unseen. Parsism looked forward to a time when the struggle with material things would be lulled to rest; the joy of Greece was the perception of the struggle itself. He had no place for hope; he lived in present experience, and that which made life to him glad was just the sense of its conflict. And the reason is plain. The Greek was by nature an athlete. His Isthmian games were only the expression of his deepest nature. Competition was his very atmosphere. He was a born wrestler, a man who felt from the very beginning that his destiny was to strive. Is it surprising that he should have deified in nature that in which he seemed to find a resemblance to himself? Is it wonderful that he should have projected his own ideal into the earth and sea and sky of his native land? At all events, he did project it. He saw in the world around him a reflex of that world which he felt within him. He recognised in nature the same elements of struggle which he found in himself, and he consecrated nature on this ground. He worshipped things as they were -as they exhibited themselves in the daily struggle for survival. And because his ideal of excellence was the power to strive, he bowed his head to things

1 The Eleatic and Platonic schools are of course exceptions; but these are attempts to graft Eastern thought on a Western soil. Epicurus, on the other hand, has an echo of the native ring.

of opposite quality. Strife demands opposition; it demands a sense of difficulty on the part of the combatant. The Greek reverenced the powers of nature and the powers of mind more from their aspect of imperfection than from their semblance of completeness; he loved them because they seemed to make their way through opposing clouds and retarding storms. It is by this that I explain the strange combinations of thought that meet in his worship, the number of dissimilar things that dwell side by side in his temple. He puts them side by side, that out of their contrast there may come conflict, and that out of their conflict there may arise the ideal which he loves. Let me try to illustrate this.

One of the most prominent objects of worship in ancient Greece is Apollo. In later times he is the sun-god, but this was a light into which he grew. Apollo became the sun as a reward for work done on the earthly plane. That work was the service of man. He is from the beginning the representative of ideal humanity, the embodiment of all that is pure and noble in the human spirit. He is to the mind of Greece what the names of the canonised are to the mind of Medievalism-a symbol of the saintly life. It is this purifying power which is sought to be indicated when he is

1 In the Homeric poems Apollo is viewed as quite distinct from the sun-god; see, for example, the opening of the 'Iliad.'

called the god of medicine-the restorer and preserver of that physical health which has so much to do with the health of the soul. Apollo stands for the perfect man, the man unspotted by the world. But then, side by side with this picture, there is another and a different one, and the two are made to blend together. Apollo is the saintly man, but he is at the same time the gay man. He is unspotted by the world, but he is also at the very heart of the world. Pure himself, he holds in his hand everything that is supposed to be a temptation against purity. He has the hot blood of youth in his veins; his mildness is not the result of a cool temperament, but dwells beside a river of rushing passion. He is always represented with a bow and with a lyre. It is intended to mark the fact that he is the embodiment at once of the martial and the musical. He is the leader of men in the ranks of war, and he is the delight of men in the ranks of peace. He supplies at once the sources of physical strength and the means of social enjoyment. These are elements not cominonly associated with the saintly life; they are supposed to furnish incentives to temptation, seductions from the path of that life. Why, then, are they associated here? Is not the reason plain? Is it not clear that the Greek put these temptations into the hand of Apollo just because they were temptations, just because they supplied an oppor

tunity for that struggle in which the Greek above all things delighted? When he invests the pure man with the bow and with the lyre, it is because he wants purity to be not an empty thing, not the result of mere mental vacancy or of simple inanity, but the product of a deliberate choice and the fruit of a determinate struggle. The Greek has been here true to himself, true to his country, true to his national ideal. He has given Apollo the wreath of purity because he has won that wreath by conquest. He has worshipped his unspottedness because it has been an unspottedness where spots might have been—a whiteness which has remained uncontaminated amidst conditions and amidst environments in which the incurring of contamination seemed almost a necessary thing.

In

Again. If Apollo was the Greek's ideal of manhood, Artemis was his ideal of womanhood. fixing upon Artemis as his type of womanhood, the Greek has done honour to himself. Artemis is the representative of chastity. Out of all the possible excellences which are associated with the name of woman, he has selected this one as the most glorious and the most desirable one. He has passed by his own natural predilection for the beautiful; he has subordinated his instinctive tendency to give prominence to the symmetry of form; he has made selection of a quality which is of all qualities the least distinctive of his race, and has thereby