replaced by
joy. The pageantry of the hours may have been too near to nature to
know of shame, it was yet too close to the divine to know of hate.
Man, then, for the first time, loved what he worshipped and worshipped
what he loved. His brilliant and musical Bible moved his heart without
tormenting it. It conducted but did not constrain. It taught him that
in death all are equal and that in life the noble-minded are serene.

In the Genesis of this Bible there is an account of a golden age and
of a paradise into which evil was introduced by woman. The account is
Hesiod's, to whom the Orient had furnished the details. It may be that
both erred. If ever there were a golden age it must have been in those
days when heaven was on earth and, mingling familiarly with men, were
processions of gods, gods of love, of light, of liberty, thousands of
them, not one of whom had ever heard an atheist's voice. Related to
humanity, of the same blood, sons of the same Aryan mother, they
differed from men only in that the latter died because they were real,
while they were deathless because ideal.

The ideal was too fair. Presently Pallas became the soul of Athens.
But meanwhile from the East there strayed swarms of enigmatic faces;
the harlot handmaids of her Celestial Highness Ishtar, Princess of
Heaven; the mutilated priests of Tammuz her lover; dual conceptions
that resulted in Aphrodite Pandemos, the postures of Priapos, the leer
of the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms of worship comparable, in the
circumadjacent beauty, to latrinae in a garden, ignoble shapes that
violated the candour of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece became so
accustomed that on them moral aphorisms were engraved. "In the mind of
Hellas, these things," Renan, with his usual unctuousness, declared,
"awoke but pious thoughts."

Pious at heart Hellas was. Even art, which now is wholly profane, with
her was wholly sacred. The sanctity was due to its perfection. The
perfection was such that imbeciles who fancy that it has been or could
be surpassed show merely that they know nothing about it. At Athens,
where Pheidias created a palpable Olympos, Pallas stood colossally, a
torch in her hand, a lance at her shoulder, a shield at her side, a
plastron of gold on her immaculate breast, a golden robe about her
ivory form, and on her immortal brow a crown of gold, beneath which,
sapphire eyes, that saw and foresaw, glittered. To-day the place where
the marvellous cre