thought was not
revealed in its full power till the time of Plotinus in the third
century A. D.; that of Aristotle, one might say without undue paradox,
not till its exposition by Aquinas in the thirteenth.

The old Third Stage, therefore, becomes now a Fourth, comprising the
later and more popular movements of the Hellenistic Age, a period based
on the consciousness of manifold failure, and consequently touched both
with morbidity and with that spiritual exaltation which is so often the
companion of morbidity. It not only had behind it the failure of the
Olympian theology and of the free city-state, now crushed by
semi-barbarous military monarchies; it lived through the gradual
realization of two other failures--the failure of human government, even
when backed by the power of Rome or the wealth of Egypt, to achieve a
good life for man; and lastly the failure of the great propaganda of
Hellenism, in which the long-drawn effort of Greece to educate a corrupt
and barbaric world seemed only to lead to the corruption or
barbarization of the very ideals which it sought to spread. This sense
of failure, this progressive loss of hope in the world, in sober
calculation, and in organized human effort, threw the later Greek back
upon his own soul, upon the pursuit of personal holiness, upon emotions,
mysteries and revelations, upon the comparative neglect of this
transitory and imperfect world for the sake of some dream-world far off,
which shall subsist without sin or corruption, the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever. These four are the really significant and
formative periods of Greek religious thought; but we may well cast our
eyes also on a fifth stage, not historically influential perhaps, but at
least romantic and interesting and worthy of considerable respect, when
the old religion in the time of Julian roused itself for a last
spiritual protest against the all-conquering 'atheism' of the
Christians. I omit Plotinus, as in earlier chapters I have omitted Plato
and Aristotle, and for the same reason. As a rule in the writings of
Julian's circle and still more in the remains of popular belief, the
tendencies of our fourth stage are accentuated by an increased demand
for definite dogma and a still deeper consciousness of worldly defeat.

I shall not start with any definition of religion. Religion, like
poetry and most other living things, cannot be defined. But one may
perhaps give some description of it, or at least som