sited on anyone that omitted to guide a stranger on
his way.

Israel was too strictly monotheistic to raise an altar to Pity, the
rest of antiquity too cruel. In Athens there was one. In addition
there were missions for the needy, asylums for the infirm. If
anywhere, at that period, human sympathy existed, it was in Greece.
The aristocratic silence of Plato may have been due to that fact. He
would not talk of the obvious, though he did of the vile. In one of
his books the then common and abnormal conception of sexuality was, if
not authorized, at least condoned. It is conjectural, however, whether
the conception was more monstrous than that which subsequent mysticity
evolved.

Said Ruysbroeck: "The mystic carries her soul in her hand and gives it
to whomsoever she wishes." Said St. Francis of Sales: "The soul draws
to itself motives of love and delectates in them." What the gift and
what the delectation were, other saints have described.

Marie de la Croix asserted that in the arms of the celestial Spouse
she swam in an ocean of delight. Concerning that Spouse, Marie
Alacoque added: "Like the most passionate of lovers he made me
understand that I should taste what is sweetest in the suavity of
caresses, and indeed, so poignant were they, that I swooned." The
ravishments which St. Theresa experienced she expressed in terms of
abandoned precision. Mme. Guyon wrote so carnally of the divine that
Bossuet exclaimed; "Seigneur, if I dared, I would pray that a seraph
with a flaming sword might come and purify my lips sullied by this
recital."[39]

[Footnote 39: Relation sur le Quietisme.]

Augustin pleasantly remarked that we are all born for hell. One need
not agree with him. In the presence of the possibly monstrous and the
impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn
away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is
ennobling beside the turpitudes that Christian mysticism produced.

At Athens, meanwhile, the religion of State persisted. So also did
philosophy. When, occasionally, the two met, the latter bowed. That
was sufficient. Religion exacted respect, not belief. It was not a
faith, it was a law, one that for its majesty was admired and for its
poetry was beloved. In the deification of whatever is exquisite it was
but an artistic cult. The real Olympos was the Pantheon. The other was
fading away. Deeper and deeper it was sinking back into the golden
dream from which it had sp