deals and seen his god face
to face, is told: 'After this you can show the way to others.'

But this leads us to the second great division of our subject. We turn
from the phenomena of the sky to those of the soul.

* * * * *

If what I have written elsewhere is right, one of the greatest works of
the Hellenic spirit, and especially of fifth-century Athens, was to
insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism, the difference
between Man and God. Sophrosyne in religion was the message of the
classical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a
lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first _Theos_. At
any rate the primeval kings and queens were treated as divine.[152:2]
Just for a few great generations, it would seem, humanity rose to a
sufficient height of self-criticism and self-restraint to reject these
dreams of self-abasement or megalomania. But the effort was too great
for the average world; and in a later age nearly all the kings and
rulers--all people in fact who can command an adequate number of
flatterers--become divine beings again. Let us consider how it came
about.

First there was the explicit recognition by the soberest philosophers of
the divine element in man's soul.[153:1] Aristotle himself built an
altar to Plato. He did nothing superstitious; he did not call Plato a
god, but we can see from his beautiful elegy to Eudemus, that he
naturally and easily used language of worship which would seem a little
strange to us. It is the same emotion--a noble and just emotion on the
whole--which led the philosophic schools to treat their founders as
'heroes', and which has peopled most of Europe and Asia with the
memories and the worship of saints. But we should remember that only a
rare mind will make its divine man of such material as Plato. The common
way to dazzle men's eyes is a more brutal and obvious one.

To people who were at all accustomed to the conception of a God-Man it
was difficult not to feel that the conception was realized in Alexander.
His tremendous power, his brilliant personality, his achievements
beggaring the fables of the poets, put people in the right mind for
worship. Then came the fact that the kings whom he conquered were, as a
matter of fact, mostly regarded by their subjects as divine
beings.[154:1] It was easy, it was almost inevitable, for those who
worshipped the 'God'[154:2] Darius to feel that it was no man b