re is no
question of them here; only, in passing, I will simply assure you that
whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good
or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the
Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three great religions: the
Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the
Mediaeval, which was the Worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation;
the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty;
these three we have had--they are past,--and now, at last, we English
have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I want to
ask you. But I must explain these three old ones first.

I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God of Wisdom; so
that whatever contended against their religion,--to the Jews a stumbling
block,--was, to the Greeks--_Foolishness_.

The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in the word, of which
we keep the remnant in our words '_Di_-urnal' and '_Di_-vine'--the god
of _Day_, Jupiter the revealer. Athena is his daughter, but especially
daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the head. We are only
with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth
of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols: but I may note rapidly,
that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she often,
in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left hand for
better guard, and the Gorgon on her shield, are both representative
mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it
were,) of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge--that
knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the
heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For out of
imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but
from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and
peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears
the resistless spear.

This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity, and every habit of
life, and every form of his art developed themselves from the seeking
this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; and setting himself, as a man,
to do things evermore rightly and strongly;[3] not with any ardent
affection or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and continent energy of
will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin
there was