ngs? Why does a curse cleave to a
certain house, evil producing evil from generation to generation?
What is the relation between the divine laws which are written in the
hearts of all men, and human laws which sometimes contradict these
older ones? Thus to the educated Greeks of the fifth century the old
religion had in its essence passed away. With unexampled rapidity had
the journey here been traced which India made more slowly, which
Egypt made at a very early period, but was not able to maintain, and
which every people starting from polytheism must make if their
religion is to prosper.

New Religious Feeling; the Mysteries.--But the conscience as well as
the mind of Greece awakes at this period, and Greek religion becomes
inspired with a deeper feeling. The simple objectivity of the Homeric
spirit is gone in which man could frankly worship beings like himself
and not very far above himself. God at this time is growing greater
and more awful, and man, less certain of himself, is beginning to
feel a new sense of mystery and of shortcoming. Whether it was due to
the anxiety and depression felt in Greece during the century before
the Persian wars, or to foreign influences, or mainly to the natural
growth of the Greek mind itself, religious phenomena of a new kind
now appear. Sacrifices are heard of, which are not merely social
reunions with the deity, but are intended to expiate some guilt or to
remove some pollution. The sense of sin has arisen, which the Homeric
world knows not, and gives a new colour to man's converse with the
deity. Another new feature is the rise into prominence of cults in
which man feels himself taken possession of and inspired by his god.
Some of these belonged to Asia Minor, the great centre of worships
accompanied with ecstasy and frenzy, but some were of native growth.
In these the common man found a satisfaction which the stately
ceremonial of the temples did not afford. The official religion had
grown cold and distant; but in the worship of Demeter or Dionysus, as
afterwards of the Phrygian Cybele, the "Great Mother" whom the Romans
imported, the least educated could feel the joy of enthusiasm and of
self-forgetting under the influence of the god, and could be closely
identified with the object of worship by performing acts in which the
experience of the god was symbolically repeated.

The rapid rise of the worships of Demeter and Dionysus thus furnishes
an instance of the law that a reli