rsecutions which were the direct
result of that one confident religious error comes curiously near to
one's conception of the wickedness of the damned.

* * * * *

To turn to our immediate subject, I wish to put forward here what is
still a rather new and unauthorized view of the development of Greek
religion; readers will forgive me if, in treating so vast a subject, I
draw my outline very broadly, leaving out many qualifications, and
quoting only a fragment of the evidence.

The things that have misled us moderns in our efforts towards
understanding the primitive stage in Greek religion have been first the
widespread and almost ineradicable error of treating Homer as primitive,
and more generally our unconscious insistence on starting with the
notion of 'Gods'. Mr. Hartland, in his address as president of one of
the sections of the International Congress of Religions at Oxford,[9:1]
dwelt on the significant fact about savage religions that wherever the
word 'God' is used our trustiest witnesses tend to contradict one
another. Among the best observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance,
some hold that they have no conception of God, others that they are
constantly thinking about God. The truth is that this idea of a god far
away in the sky--I do not say merely a First Cause who is 'without body
parts or passions', but almost any being that we should naturally call a
'god'--is an idea not easy for primitive man to grasp. It is a subtle
and rarefied idea, saturated with ages of philosophy and speculation.
And we must always remember that one of the chief religions of the
world, Buddhism, has risen to great moral and intellectual heights
without using the conception of God at all; in his stead it has Dharma,
the Eternal Law.[10:1]

Apart from some few philosophers, both Christian and Moslem, the gods of
the ordinary man have as a rule been as a matter of course
anthropomorphic. Men did not take the trouble to try to conceive them
otherwise. In many cases they have had the actual bodily shape of man;
in almost all they have possessed--of course in their highest
development--his mind and reason and his mental attributes. It causes
most of us even now something of a shock to be told by a medieval Arab
philosopher that to call God benevolent or righteous or to predicate of
him any other human quality is just as Pagan and degraded as to say that
he has a beard.[10:2] Now the Greek gods seem a