th which we can meddle, but revelations
of the Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all alike,
wise and unwise, good and evil, and they claim and they permit no other
acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience of our lives, and the
plainest confession of our lips.

Such confessions, except in David's Psalms, we shall not anywhere find
more natural or unaffected than in Homer--most definite, yet never
elaborate--as far as may be from any complimenting of Providence, yet
expressing the most unquestioning conviction. We shall not often
remember them when we set about religion as a business; but when the
occasions of life stir the feelings in us on which religion itself
reposes, if we were as familiar with the Iliad as with the Psalms, the
words of the old Ionian singer would leap as naturally to our lips as
those of the Israelite king.

Zeus is not always the questionable son of Cronus, nor the gods always
the mythologic Olympians. Generally, it is true, they appear as a larger
order of subject beings--beings like men, and subject to a higher
control--in a position closely resembling that of Milton's angels, and
liable like them to passion and to error. But at times, the father of
gods and men is the Infinite and Eternal Ruler--the living Providence of
the world--and the lesser gods are the immortal administrators of his
Divine will throughout the lower creation. For ever at the head of the
universe there is an awful spiritual power; when Zeus appears with a
distinct and positive personality, he is himself subordinate to an
authority which elsewhere is one with himself. Wherever either he or the
other gods are made susceptible of emotion, the Invisible is beyond and
above them. When Zeus is the personal father of Sarpedon, and his
private love conflicts with the law of the eternal order, though he has
power to set aside the law, he dares not break it; but in the midst of
his immortality, and on his own awful throne, he weeps tears of blood in
ineffectual sorrow for his dying child. And again, there is a power
supreme both over Zeus and over Poseidon, of which Iris reminds the
latter, when she is sent to rebuke him for his disobedience to his
brother. It is a law, she says, that the younger shall obey the elder,
and the Erinnys will revenge its breach even on a god.

But descending from the more difficult Pantheon among mankind, the
Divine law of justice is conceived as clearly as we in this day ca