e theology thus
arise, homogeneous at first, but soon exhibiting variations.

[Sidenote: Introduction of personified forms.]

To that tendency for personification which marks the early life of man
are due many of the mythologic conceptions. It was thus that the Hours,
the Dawn, and Night with her black mantle bespangled with stars,
received their forms. Many of the most beautiful legends were thus of a
personified astronomical origin; many were derived from terrestrial or
familiar phenomena. The clouds were thus made to be animated things; a
moving spirit was given to the storm, the dew, the wind. The sun setting
in the glowing clouds of the west became Hercules in the fiery pile; the
morning dawn extinguished by the rising sun was embodied in the story of
Orpheus and Eurydice. These legends still survive in India.

[Sidenote: The gradual and affiliated advance of Greek theological
ideas.]

[Sidenote: The composite nature of the resulting mythology.]

But it must not be supposed that all Greek mythology can be thus
explained. It is enough for us to examine the circumstances under which,
for many ages, the European communities had been placed, to understand
that they had forgotten much that their ancestors had brought from Asia.
Much that was new had also spontaneously arisen. The well-known
variations of their theogony are not merely similar legends of different
localities, they are more frequently the successive improvements of one
place. The general theme upon which they are based requires the
admission of a primitive chaotic disturbance of incomprehensible
gigantic powers, brought into subjection by Divine agency, that agency
dividing and regulating the empire it had thus acquired in a harmonious
way. To this general conception was added a multitude of adventitious
ornaments, some of which were of a rude astronomical, some of a moral,
some, doubtless, of a historical kind. The primitive chaotic conflicts
appear under the form of the war of the Titans; their end is the
confinement of those giants in Tartarus; whose compulsory subjection is
the commencement of order: thus Atlas, the son of Iapetos, is made to
sustain the vault of heaven in its western verge. The regulation of
empire is shadowed forth in the subdivision of the universe between Zeus
and his brothers, he taking the heavens, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the
under world, all having the earth as their common theatre of action. The
moral is prefigured by