contest was to be decided between all that they each governed in man,
then and there (assumed) human form, and human weapons, and did verily
and materially strike at each other, until the Spirit of Wrath was
crushed. And when Diana is said to hunt with her nymphs in the woods,
it does not mean merely, as Wordsworth puts it,[78] that the poet or
shepherd saw the moon and stars glancing between the branches of the
trees, and wished to say so figuratively. It means that there is a
living spirit, to which the light of the moon is a body; which takes
delight in glancing between the clouds and following the wild beasts
as they wander through the night; and that this spirit sometimes
assumes a perfect human form, and in this form, with real arrows,
pursues and slays the wild beasts, which with its mere arrows of
moonlight it could not slay; retaining, nevertheless, all the while,
its power and being in the moonlight, and in all else that it
rules.

There is not the smallest inconsistency or unspirituality in this
conception. If there were, it would attach equally to the appearance
of the angels to Jacob, Abraham, Joshua, or Manoah.[79] In all those
instances the highest authority which governs our own faith requires
us to conceive divine power clothed with a human form (a form so real
that it is recognized for superhuman only by its "doing wondrously"),
and retaining, nevertheless, sovereignty and omnipresence in all the
world. This is precisely, as I understand it, the heathen idea of a
God; and it is impossible to comprehend any single part of the Greek
mind until we grasp this faithfully, not endeavouring to explain it
away in any wise, but accepting, with frank decision and definition,
the tangible existence of its deities;--blue-eyed--white-fleshed--
human-hearted,--capable at their choice of meeting man absolutely in
his own nature--feasting with him--talking with him--fighting with
him, eye to eye, or breast to breast, as Mars with Diomed;[80] or else,
dealing with him in a more retired spirituality, as Apollo sending the
plague upon the Greeks,[81] when his quiver rattles at his shoulders as
he moves, and yet the darts sent forth of it strike not as arrows, but
as plague; or, finally, retiring completely into the material universe
which they properly inhabit, and dealing with man through that, as
Scamander with Achilles, through his waves.

Nor is there anything whatever in the various actions recorded of the
gods,