oints, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the
source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a
stage of society remote from ours. This standard takes its rise in
Greece, at a definite historical period. A tradition for all succeeding
generations, it originates in a spontaneous growth out of the influences
of Greek society. What were the conditions under which this ideal, this
standard of artistic orthodoxy, was generated? How was Greece enabled to
force its thought upon Europe?

Greek art, when we first catch sight of it, is entangled with Greek
religion. We are accustomed to think of Greek religion as the religion of
art and beauty, the religion of which the Olympian Zeus and the Athena
Polias are the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred books. Thus Cardinal
Newman speaks of "the classical polytheism which was gay and graceful, as
was natural in a civilised age." Yet such a view is only a partial one;
in it the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture
but loses sight of the sombre world across which it strikes. Greek
religion, where we can observe it most distinctly, is at once a
magnificent ritualistic system, and a cycle of poetical conceptions.
Religions, as they grow by natural laws out of man's life, are modified
by whatever modifies his life. They brighten under a bright sky, they
become liberal as the social range widens, they grow intense and shrill
in the clefts of human life, where the spirit is narrow and confined, and
the stars are visible at noonday; and a fine analysis of these
differences is one of the gravest functions of religious criticism.
Still, the broad foundation, in mere human nature, of all religions as
they exist for the greatest number, is a universal pagan sentiment, a
paganism which existed before the Greek religion, and has lingered far
onward into the Christian world, ineradicable, like some persistent
vegetable growth, because its seed is an element of the very soil out of
which it springs. This pagan sentiment measures the sadness with which
the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from what is
here, and now. It is beset by notions of irresistible natural powers, for
the most part ranged against man, but the secret also of his fortune,
making the earth golden and the grape fiery for him. He makes gods in his
own image, gods smiling and flower-crowned, or bleeding by some sad
fatality, to console him by