declared plainly enough what was to be regarded
as religious duty, belief was quite free to grow as circumstances or
the growth of culture dictated. A religion in such a position, and
among a people of lively imagination and specially gifted in the
direction of art, must necessarily receive its forms rather from the
artist than the priest.

Artistic Tendency.--Thus we can discern from the first the direction
which Greek religion must take. The Greeks shaped their gods earlier
and more freely than other peoples, and went on shaping them till no
further advance could be made in that way. Long before Homer they had
been making their gods such as free men, and men endowed with a sense
of beauty, could worship. They were not content to worship lifeless
objects, but must have living beings. They were not content to
worship beings without reason, they must worship reasonable beings.
They were not inclined to regard the natural objects they worshipped
with terror or self-prostration, but rather in a spirit of genial
friendliness and sympathy as being something like themselves. And so
they turned their gods into men. The anthropomorphising tendency,
present as we have seen in other lands and at much earlier periods,
present indeed wherever religion is a growing power, had freer play
with them than with any other people. Thus the spirits of the
fountain and the tree, and of every part of nature that was
worshipped, took human form. At first, no doubt, the nymph was in the
fountain, the dryad in the oak, but as time went on the human maiden
cast off her mosses and her bark and leaves, and stood forth to
imagination a being wholly human, dwelling beside the fountain or the
tree. In the same way heaven becomes a great human father, the sea an
earth-shaking potentate drawn by dolphins over the waves, the sun a
mighty archer, fire a lame craftsman (from the flickering of flame?)
whose smithy is underground where the volcanoes are. And the figures
once arrived at, it was no hard task to spin out their stories and
their relations with each other, and to connect with them older
tales, as taste or fancy suggested.

The thorough humanisation of the gods, the clothing of the gods in
the highest types connected with free human society, is the first
great contribution made by this gifted race to the progress of
religion. Receiving from the earlier world the same kind of gods as
other nations did, Greece proceeded to treat them in a way of