he wine
and corn wherewith man sustained himself, assumed a higher and richer
meaning. Food and drink were not mere sensual gratifications, but divine
gifts, as they are in the twenty-third Psalm; and the whole material
world was a symbol and sacrament of spiritual realities and blessings.
Similarly the ritual of Eleusis interpreted man's common life into a
wonderful world of mystic spirituality. Thus there was a great fund of
spiritual insight of the finest and most beautiful sort in the very
heart of that life which has thoughtlessly been adopted as the type of
paganism.

Yet the history of Greece affords the explanation and even the
justification of the popular idea. The pagan who is in us all, tends
ever to draw us downwards from sacramental and symbolic ways of thinking
to the easier life of the body and the earth. On the one hand, for blood
that is young and hot, the life of sense is overwhelming. On the other
hand, for the weary toiler whose mind is untrained, the impression of
the world is that of heavy clay. Each in his own way finds idealism
difficult to retain. The spirituality of nature floats like a dream
before the mind of poets, and is seen now and then in wistful glimpses
by every one; but it needs some clearer and less elusive form, as well
as some definite association with conscience, if it is to be defended
against the pull of the green earth. It has been well said that, for the
Greek, God was the view; but when the traveller goes forward into the
view, he meets with many things which it is dangerous to identify with
God. For the young spirit of the early times the temptation to
earthliness was overwhelming. The world was fair, its gates were open,
and its barriers all down. Men took from literature and from religion
just as much of spirituality as they understood and as little as they
desired, and the effect was swift and inevitable in that degeneration
which reached its final form in the degraded sensuality of the later
Roman Empire.

The confusing element in all such inquiry lies in the fact that one can
never get an unmixed paganism nor a perfect idealism. Just as the claims
of body and spirit are in our daily life inextricably interwoven, so the
Greek thought hung precariously between the two, and was always more or
less at the mercy of the individual interpreter and of the relative
strength of his tastes and passions. So we shall find it all through the
course of these studies. It would be pre