pert, living but to eat
and drink, and pilfering the good things, to convey them stealthily to
their friends outside the castle wall.' The thing that hath been, that
shall be again. When Homer wrote, the type had settled into its long
enduring form. 'Such are they,' he adds, in his good-natured irony, 'as
the valet race ever love to be.'

With such evidence of identity among us all, it is worth while to look
closer at the old Greeks, to try to find in Homer something beyond fine
poetry, or exciting adventures, or battle-scenes, or material for
scholarship; for awhile to set all that aside, and look in him for the
story of real living men--set to pilgrimise in the old way on the same
old earth--men such as we are, children of one family, with the same
work to do, to live the best life they could, and to save their
souls--with the same trials, the same passions, the same difficulties,
if with weaker means of meeting them.

And first for their religion.

Let those who like it, lend their labour to the unravelling the secrets
of the mythologies. Theogonies and Theologies are not religion; they are
but its historic dress and outward or formal expression, which, like a
language, may be intelligible to those who see the inward meaning in the
sign, but no more than confused sound to us who live in another
atmosphere, and have no means of transferring ourselves into the
sentiment of an earlier era. It is not in these forms of a day or of an
age that we should look for the real belief--the real feelings of the
heart; but in the natural expressions which burst out
spontaneously--expressions of opinion on Providence, on the relation of
man to God, on the eternal laws by which this world is governed. Perhaps
we misuse the word in speaking of religion; we ought rather to speak of
piety: piety is always simple; the emotion is too vast, too
overpowering, whenever it is genuine, to be nice or fantastic in its
form; and leaving philosophies and cosmogonies to shape themselves in
myth and legend, it speaks itself out with a calm and humble clearness.
We may trifle with our own discoveries, and hand them over to the fancy
or the imagination for elaborate decoration. We may shroud over supposed
mysteries under an enigmatic veil, and adapt the degrees of initiation
to the capacities of our pupils; but before the vast facts of God and
Providence, the difference between man and man dwarfs into nothing. They
are no discoveries of our own wi