Chapter III: The Dissolution of Paganism

Greek religion seems to have contained three factors of unequal prominence, but ultimately of about equal importance and longevity. Most obvious, especially if we begin our study with Homer, is the mythology which presents us with a multitude of gods, male and female, often related by blood, and having social and even hostile relations with one another. If we examine their characters, attributes, and fables, we readily perceive that most of them are impersonations of natural forces. Some, however, figure prominently as patrons of special arts or special places, as Apollo of prophecy and music, of Delos and Delphi; and yet others seem to be wholly personifications of human powers, as Athena of prudence and of martial and industrial arts.

Underlying this mythology is another element, probably more ancient, the worship of ancestors, local divinities, and domestic gods. With these were naturally connected various ritual observances, and especially the noblest and most important of rites, the sacrifice. Such practices may be supposed to have belonged originally to the tribal religion, and to have passed by analogy to the great natural gods, when these had been once created by the poet and perhaps identified with the older genius of that spot where their efficacy was first signally manifested.

Finally, as a third element, we find the religion of the priests, soothsayers, and magicians, as well as the rites of Orpheus, Bacchus, and the Great Goddesses at Eleusis. These forms of worship showed Oriental affinities and partook of a kind of nocturnal horror and mystical enthusiasm. They were the Greek representatives of the religion of revelation and of sacraments, and bore much the same relation to the supernaturalistic elements in Christianity as does the idea of a shade in Hades to the idea of a soul in heaven. The fundamental intuitions were the same, but in Pagan times they remained vague, doubtful, and incoherent.

These three forms of religion lay together in men's minds and habits throughout the formative period of Greek literature. There was an occasional rivalry among them, but the tolerance characteristic of Paganism could reconcile their claims without much difficulty, and admit them all to a share of honour. The history of the three elements, however, differs essentially, as might be expected after a consideration of their respective natures. The antique family religion lived by inertia; it was obeyed without being justified theoretically, and remained strong by its very obscurity. Many customs which a man may have occasion to conform to only once or twice in his life endure for ages and survive the ebb and flow of intellectual and political systems. Nursery tales, trivial superstitions, customs connected with weddings or funerals, or with certain days of the year, have a strange and irrational persistence; they surprise us by emerging into prominence after centuries of a sort of subterraneous existence. Thus the deification of Roman emperors was not the sacrilegious innovation which it might appear to be, but on the contrary a restoration of the spirit of the most ancient faith, a revival called to the aid of a new polity by the mingled statecraft and superstition of the times. Thus, too, the Christian care in the burial of the dead (contrary as it is to the theoretical spiritualism of Christianity), the feast of All Souls, and the prayers for the departed are evidences of the same latent human religion underlying the cosmic flights and public controversies of theology.

The mysteries, on the other hand, had essentially a spirit of self-consciousness and propaganda. They came as revelations or as reforms; they pretended to disclose secrets handed down from remote antiquity, from the primeval revelation of God to man, or truths recovered by the inspiration of later prophets supernaturally illumined. The history of these movements is, accordingly, the history-of sects. They never constituted the normal and common religion of the people, and never impressed their spirit on the national literature. Æschylus or Plato may have borrowed something from them; but they did so most when they assumed an attitude of open opposition to the exoteric religion of their country. Thus when Plato makes his Socrates propound a Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine of transmigration, he represents the very members of the Socratic circle as surprised, or as incredulous: and when they are finally silenced by the proofs advanced, it is only because they are overawed by the dogmatic unction of a dying sage, who stimulates their imagination with poetic myths, and confuses their intellect with verbal equivocations. When the mist of the argument has cleared away, like incense after the sacrifice, there remains indeed a profound emotion, a catharsis produced by the sublimity and pathos, so artfully mingled, of both scene and argument; but the bare doctrine enunciated, true and profound as it is in its deeper meaning, is quite incapable of appealing to an undisciplined mind, and could not pass for a religious dogma except for the priestly robes in which it is dressed. Thus the function of the mysteries of which Plato's Phædo may be regarded as a philosophic echo, was to be the vehicle of revolutionary tendencies, tendencies which a philosopher might privately shape in one way and a superstitious man in another. Both could find in the spell of an occult ceremonial and in the prophecies of an oracular creed an escape from the limitations of the official religion. Mysticism and the claim to illumination found in these mysteries their natural expression. The many fundamental questions left unanswered and unasked by Paganism, the many potentialities of religious emotion left unexercised by it, were thus allowed to appear.

Independently of these two comparatively silent streams of religious life, we may trace the current of polytheistic theology,--a current which naturally left a plainer trace in literature, since it contained all there might be in Greece of speculation and controversy in religious matters. The moral sanctions of religion were embodied in the domestic and civic worship; the pious imagination remained thereby all the freer to follow the analogies of physical objects in its mythology. Apollo was the father of Asclepius and the leader of the Muses; his ideal dignity and beneficence were vouched for by those attributes. He could well afford, therefore, as the Sun-god, to decimate the Greek army with the same fatal shafts with which he slew the Python. The moral function of the god was certain on other grounds, being enshrined in the local religions of the people. The poet might follow without scruple the suggestions of experience; he might attribute to the god the various activities, beneficent and maleficent, observable in the element over which he presided. This is a liberty taken even in the most moralistic religions. In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; as when we hear that to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Such characterizations appeal to our sense of fact. They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour. For we naturally seek to express his awful actuality, his unchallengeable power, no less than his holiness and beauty. This sense of the real existence of religious objects can only be maintained by identifying them with objects of actual experience, with the forces of Nature, or the passions or conscience of man, or (if it must come to that) with written laws or visible images.

An instinctive recognition of this necessity kept Greek mythology ever ready to return to Nature to gather its materials afresh from a docile, if poetical, observation of reality. The character of the god must be studied in the manifestations of his chosen element; otherwise men might forget that, although the form of the god was poetical, his essence was a positive reality of the most practical kind. Zeus must still toss his ambrosial locks with a certain irritation, in order that we may recognize him in the rumblings of the sky; he must still be capable of wrath and deliberate malice, that his awful hand may be thought to have hurled the thunderbolt. Cronos must not be forbidden to devour his children, else we should no longer reverence in him the inexorable might of time. Mythology was quite right in not shrinking from such poetic audacities. They were its chief title to legitimacy, the proof, amid the embroideries of fancy which over-lay the divine idea, that the god was not an invention, but a fact. He had been found, he was known. His character, like all character, was merely a principle which reflection discovered in his observed conduct. The reality, then, of the mythological gods was initially unquestionable; and the more faithful the study of Nature by which the poet was inspired, the more authority did his prophetic vision retain.

But the intense imaginative vitality that must have preceded Homer and Hesiod, the prodigious gift of sympathetic observation to which we owe Zeus and Pan and all their endless retinue, was too glorious to last. No later interpreter could find so much meaning in his text. Mythology was accordingly placed in a sad dilemma, with either horn fatal to its life; it must either be impoverished to remain sincere, or become artificial to remain adequate. The history of Greek religion, on its speculative side, is nothing but the story of this double decadence. Reflection upon the process of Nature and desire for philosophic truth led inevitably to a blank pantheism and to the reduction of positive traditions to moral allegories. This was the direction taken by the Stoic theology. On the other hand, adherence to the traditional gods, with no further vivifying reference to their natural functions in the world, could lead only to arbitrary fictions, which, having no foothold or justification in reality, were incapable of withstanding the first sceptical attack. What an age of imagination had intuited as truth, an age of reflection could preserve only as fable; and as fable, accordingly, the religion of the ancients survived throughout the Christian ages. It remains still the mother-tongue of the imagination and, in spite of all revolutions and admixtures, is the classic language of art and poetry, which no other means of expression has superseded.

Beginning, however, with that zealous Protestant, the old Xenophanes, the austerer minds, moralists, naturalists, and wits, united in decrying the fanciful polytheism of the poets. This criticism was in one sense unjust; it did not consider the original justification of mythology in human nature and in the external facts. It was, like all heresy or partial scepticism, in a sense superficial and unphilosophical. It was far from conceiving that its own tenets and assumptions were as groundless, without being as natural or adequate, as the system it attacked. To a person sufficiently removed by time or by philosophy from the controversies of sects, orthodoxy must always appear right and heresy wrong; for he sees in orthodoxy the product of the creative mind, of faith and constructive logic, but in heresy only the rebellion of some partial interest or partial insight against the corollaries of a formative principle imperfectly grasped and obeyed with hesitation. At a distance, the criticism that disintegrates any great product of art or mind must always appear short-sighted and unamiable. Socrates, invoking; the local deities of brooks and meadows, or paying the debt of a cock to Asclepius (in thanksgiving, it is said, for a happy death), is more reasonable and noble to our mind than are the hard denials of Xenophanes or Theodoras. But in their day the revolt of the sceptics had its relative justification. The imagination had dried up, and what had once been a natural interpretation of facts now seemed an artificial addition to them. An elaborate and irrelevant world of fiction seemed to have been imposed on human credulity. Mythology was, in fact, already largely irrelevant; the experience poetized by it had been forgotten and the symbol, in its insignificance, could not be honestly or usefully retained.

The Greek philosophers, as a rule, proceeded cautiously in these matters. They passed mythology by with a conventional reverence and looked elsewhere for the true object of their personal religion. But the old mythological impulse was not yet spent; it showed itself still active in all the early philosophers who gave the godhead new incarnations congruous with the character of their respective physical systems. To the Socratic School the natural world was no longer the sphere in which divinity was to be found. They looked for the divine rather in moral and intelligible ideas. But not only did they carry the mythological instinct with them into that new field, they also retained it in the field of Nature, whenever they still regarded Nature as real. Thus Aristotle, while he rejected the anthropomorphism of the popular faith, attributing it to political exigencies, turned the forty-nine spheres, of which he conjectured that the heaven might be composed, into a pantheon of forty-nine divinities. Every primary movement, he argued, must be the expression of an eternal essence by which the movement is justified, as the movement of the mind in thinking or loving is justified by the truth or excellence of the object of thought or of love. Without such a worthy object, these spiritual activities would be irrational; and no less irrational would be the motion of the spheres, were each not obedient to the influence of some sacred and immutable principle. Forty-nine gods accordingly exist; but no more. For, since the essence of each is to be the governing ideal of a motion, the number of motions in the sky determines the number of divine first principles. The gods, we see, are still the souls of Nature; a soul without a body would be a principle without an application; there can be no gods, then, without a phenomenal function, no gods that do not appear in the operations of Nature. This astronomic mythology was surely not less poetical than that of Homer, even if, by virtue of a certain cold and abstract purity, not unworthy of the stars of which it spoke, it was more difficult and sublime. We may observe in it a last application of the ancient mythological method by which the phenomena of Nature became evidence of the existence and character of the gods.

But the celestial deities of Aristotle, and the minor creative gods of Plato that correspond to them, retained too much poetic individuality for the still poorer imagination of later times. The most religious of sects during the classical decadence was that of the Stoics; in them the spirit of conformity, which is a chief part even of the religions of hope, constituted by its exclusive cultivation a religion of despair. The name of Zeus, and an equally equivocal use of the word "reason" to designate the regularity of Nature, served to disguise the alien brutality of the power or law to which all the gods had been reduced. Against the background of a materialistic pantheism, in which Stoic speculation culminated, two positive interests stood out: one, the resolute and truly human courage with which the Stoic faced the reality as he conceived it, and kept his dignity and his conscience pure although heaven might fall; the other, the efforts he made, in his need for religion, to rejuvenate and reinterpret the pagan forms. The fables he turned into ethical allegories, the oracles, auspices, and other superstitious rites, he transformed into quasi-scientific ways of reading the book of Nature and forecasting events.

This possibility of prophecy constituted the Stoic "providence" which the sentimentality of modern apologists has been glad to confuse with the _benevolent_ Providence of Christian dogma, a Providence making for the salvation of men. The Stoic providence excluded that essential element of benevolence; it was merely the fact that Nature was prophetic of her own future, that her parts, both in space and in time, were magically composed into one living system. Mythology thus ended with the conception of a single god whose body was the whole physical universe, whose fable was all history, and whose character was the principle of the universal natural order. No attempt was made by the ancient Stoics to make this divinity better or more amiable than the evidence of experience showed it to be; the self-centred, self-sufficient Stoic morality, the recourse to suicide, and the equality in happiness and dignity between the wise man and Zeus, all prove quite conclusively that nothing more was asked or expected of Nature than what she chose to give; to be virtuous was in man's power, and nothing else was a good to man. The universe could neither benefit nor injure him; and thus we see that, despite a reverential tone and an occasional reminiscence of the thunderbolts of Zeus, the Stoic's conscience knew how to scorn the moral nothingness of that blank deity to which his metaphysics had reduced the genial company of the gods.

Thus the reality which the naturalistic gods had borrowed from the elements proved to be a dangerous prerogative; being real and manifest, these gods had to be conceived according to our experience of their operation, so that with every advance in scientific observation theology had to be revised, and something had to be subtracted from the personality and benevolence of the gods. The moral character originally attributed to them necessarily receded before the clearer definition of natural forces and the accumulated experience of national disasters. Finally, little remained of the gods except their names, reduced to rhetorical synonyms for the various departments of Nature; Phoebus was nothing but a bombastic way of saying the sun; Hephæstus became nothing but fire, Eros or Aphrodite nothing but love, Zeus nothing but the general force and law of Nature. Thus the gods remained real, but were no longer gods. If belief in their reality was to be kept up, they could not retain too many attributes that had no empirical manifestation. They must be reduced, as it were, to their fighting weight. All that the imagination had added to them by way of personal character, sanctity, and life must be rejected as anthropomorphism and fable.

Such is the necessary logic of natural religion. If Nature manifests the existence of a god, she must to that extent manifest his character; if she does not manifest his character, she cannot involve his existence. We observe to-day a process exactly analogous to that by which the natural divinities of Greece were reduced again to the physical or social forces from which poetry had originally evoked their forms. Many minds are grown too timid to build their religious faith unblushingly on revelation, or on that moral imagination or inward demand which revelation comes to express and to satisfy. They seek, therefore, to naturalize the Deity and to identify it with some principle of history, of Nature, or of logic. But this identification cannot be made without great concessions on both sides. The accommodations which ensue inevitably involve many equivocations, and some misrepresentations of the heterogeneous principles, now natural, now moral, which it is sought to unify. Confused and agonized by these contradictions, the natural theologian, if he keep his honesty, can only rest in the end in a chastened recognition of the facts of experience, toward which he will, no doubt, exercise his acquired habits of acquiescence and euphemism. But these habits, the survival of which gives his philosophy some air of being still a religion, will not be inherited by his disciples and successors; a pious manner may survive religious faith, but will not survive it long. The society to whom the reformer teaches a reticent and embarrassed naturalism will discard the reticence and avow the naturalism with pride. The masses of men will see no reason why they should not live out their native impulses or acquired passions without fear of that environing power of which they are, after all, the highest embodiment; while a few thinkers, devout and rational by temperament, will know how to maintain their dignity of spirit in the face of a universe of which they ask no favour save the revelation of its laws. Thus irreligion for the many and Stoicism for the few is the end of natural religion in the modern world as it was in the ancient.

But natural religion (that is, the turning of the facts and laws of Nature or of experience into an object of worship) is by no means a primitive nor an ultimate form of religion; it is rather of all the forms of religion the most unnatural and the least capable of existing without a historical and emotional setting, independent of its own essence and inconsistent with its principle. No nation has ever had a merely natural religion. What is called by that name has been the appanage of a few philosophers in ages of religious disintegration, when the habit of worship, surviving the belief in any proper object of worship, has been transferred with effort and uncertainty to the natural order which alone remained before the mind,--to the cosmos, the self, the state, or humanity. Mythology, of which natural religion is the last and most abstract phase, was originally religious only in so far as it was supernatural in so far, I mean, as the analogies of outer Nature led the poet to conceive some moral ideal, some glorious being full of youth and serenity, of passion and wisdom. Only when thus transfigured into the human could the natural seem divine. The Greeks were never idolaters, and no more worshipped the sun or moon or the whole of Nature than they did statues of bronze or marble; they worshipped only the god who had a temporal image in the temple as he had an eternal image in the sun or in the universe.

It happened, therefore, that in the decay of mythology the gods could still survive as moral ideals. The more they were cut off from their accidental foothold in the world of fact, the more clearly could they manifest their essence as expressions of the world of values. We have mentioned the fact that the greater gods of Greece were almost wholly detached from the cosmographical hints which had originally suggested their character and fable. Thus emancipated, these nobler gods could survive in the consciousness of the devout, fixed there by their purely moral significance and poetic truth. Apollo or Athena showed little or nothing of a naturalistic origin; they were patrons of life, embodiments of the ideal, objects of contemplation for souls that by prayer would rise to the semblance of the god to whom they prayed. This transformation into the moral had been going on from the beginning in the religious mind of Greece. It was really the legitimate fulfilment of that translation into the human to which mythology itself was due. But mythology had merely turned the physical into the personal and impassioned; religion was now to turn the psychical into the good. This tendency came to a vivid and rational expression in Plato. The gods, he declared, should be represented only as they were, _i.e._ as moral ideals. The scandal of their fables should be removed and they should be regarded as authors only of the good, in their own lives as in ours. To refer all things to the efficacy of the gods should be accounted impiety. They, like the supreme and abstract principle of all excellence which they embodied, could be the authors only of what is good.

Had this remarkable doctrine been carried out fully it would have led to important results. We should have had goodness as the criterion of divinity, to the exclusion of power. God would have become avowedly an ideal, a pattern to which the world might or might not conform. Such potential conformity would have remained dependent on causes, natural or free, with which God, not being a power, could have nothing to do. Plato and Aristotle did, in fact, construct a theology on these lines, but they obscured its purity in their well-meant attempts to connect (more or less mythically or magically) their own Socratic principle of excellence with the cosmic principles of the earlier philosophers. The elements of confusion and pantheism which were thus introduced into the Socratic philosophy made it more acceptable, perhaps, to the theologians of later times, in whose religion a pantheistic tendency was also latent. In the hands of Jewish, Christian, or Mohammedan commentators the mythical and magical part of the Greek conceptions was naturally emphasized and the rational part reinterpreted and obscured. Plato had spoken, in one of his myths, of a Demiurgos, a personification of the Idea of the Good, who directly or indirectly made the world in his own image, rendering it as perfect as the indeterminate Chaos he worked on would allow. Aristotle had spoken of an intelligence, happy and self-contemplative, who was the principle of movement in the heavens, and through the heavens in the rest of Nature. Such expressions had a sound far too congruous with Mosaic doctrine not to be seized upon with joy by the apologists of the new faiths, who were glad to invoke the authority of classic poets and philosophers in favour of doctrines that in their Hebrew expression might so easily seem crude and irrational to the Gentiles. This assimilation gave to the casual myths of Plato and to the meagre though bold argumentation of Aristotle a turn and a significance which they hardly had to their authors. If we approach these philosophers as we should from the point of view of Greek literature and life, and prepare ourselves to see in them the disciples of Socrates rather than (what Plato was once actually declared to be) the disciples of Moses, we shall see that they were simply, mythologists of the Ideal; they refined the gods of tradition into patrons of civic discipline and art, the gods of natural philosophy into principles of intelligibility and beauty.

The creation described in the Timæus is a transparent parable. Elements which ethical reflection distinguishes in the field of experience are turned in that dialogue, with undisguised freedom of fancy, into so many half-personified primitive powers; the Ideas, the Demiurgos, Chaos, the Indeterminate, and the "gods of gods." Plato has not forgotten the lessons of Socrates and Parmenides. He distrusts as much as they any natural or genetic philosophy of existence. He virtually tells us that, if we must have a history of creation, we can hardly do better than to take ideal or moral principles, combine them as we might so many material elements, and see how the intelligible part of existence may thus receive a quasi-explanation. God remains the creator of the good only, because what he is mythically said to create is merely that in Nature which spontaneously resembles him or conforms to his idea; only this element in Nature is intelligible or good, and therefore the principle of goodness may be said to be its cause. Thus, for example, if we chose to write an Anatomy of Melancholy, we might attribute to the Demon of Spleen or to the Blue Devils only the sombre elements of that soulful compound, which, however, the evil imps would eternally tend to make as absolutely dyspeptic and like unto themselves as its primordial texture would allow. In exactly such a way Plato, in his allegorical manner, constructed a universe with a poetical machinery of moral forces, personified and treated as agents. When the thin veil of allegory is drawn aside, there remains nothing but a splendid illustration of the Socratic philosophy; we are taught that the only science is moral science, and that, if we wish to understand the world, we must bend our minds to the definition of its qualities and values, which are all that is intelligible in it. Essences and values alone are knowable and fixed and amenable to science. If we insist on history and cosmogony, we must be satisfied with having them presented to us in allegorical form, and made to follow ethics as the Timæus follows the Republic. Natural philosophy can be nothing but a sort of analytic retrospect by which we trace the first glimmerings and the progressive manifestation in Nature of those ideas which have authority over our own minds.

Phenomena had for Plato existence without reality, that is, without intelligibility or value. They were a mere appearance. We need not be surprised, then, that he refused altogether to construct a theology by the poetic interpretation of phenomena and preferred to construct one allegorically out of his moral conceptions, the good and the ideal. Aristotle, too, while adhering incidentally, as we have seen, to a purified astronomical theology, capped this with a purified moral theology of his own. The Platonic picture-gallery of ideas, with the abstract principle of excellence that unified them, gave place in his philosophy to an Ideal realized in the concrete and existing as an individual. We may venture to say that among the thinkers of all nations Aristotle was the first to reach the conception of what may fitly be called God. Neither the national deity of the Hebrews, as then conceived, nor the natural deities of the Gentiles, nor the half-physical, half-logical abstractions of the earlier Greek philosophers really corresponded to the notion of a being spiritual, personal, and perfect, immutable without being abstract, and omnipotent without effort and without degradation. Aristotle first constructed this ideal, not out of his fancy, but by building on the solid ground of human nature and following to their point of union the lines which moral aspiration and effort actually follow. Nay, the ideal he pointed to was to be the goal not of human life only but of natural life in all its forms. The analytic study of Nature (a study which at the same time must be imaginative and sympathetic) could guide us to the conception of her inner needs and tendencies and of what their proper fulfilment would be. We could then see that this fulfilment would lie in intelligence and thought. Growth is for the sake of the fruition of life, and the fruition of life consists in the pursuit and attainment of objects. The moral virtues belong to the pursuit, the intellectual to the attainment. Knowledge is the end of all endeavour, the justification and fulfilment of all growth. Intelligence is the clarification of love.

A being, then, whose life should be a life of pure and complete knowledge, would embody the goal toward which all Nature strives. When we ponder duly the short phrases in which Aristotle propounds his conception of God we find that he has called up before us the noblest possible object of human thought, the presentiment of that thought's perfect fulfilment. There is no alloy of naturalism in this conception, and at the same time no suspicion of irrelevancy. This God is not a mere title of honour for the psycho-physical universe, confusedly conceived and lumped together; he is an ultra-mundane ideal, to be an inviolate standard and goal for all moving reality. Yet he is not irrelevant to the facts and forces of the world, not the dream of an abstracted poet. He is an idea which reality everywhere evokes in evoking its own deepest craving and need. Nothing is so pertinent and momentous in life as the object we are trying to attain by thought or action, since that object is the source of our inspiration and the standard of our success. Thus Aristotle's God is not superfluous, not invented. This theology is a true idealism, I mean an idealism itself purely ideal, which establishes the authority of human demands, ethical, and logical, without impugning the existence or efficacy of that material universe which it endows with a meaning and a standard.

Yet this rational conception, the natural out-growth of the Socratic philosophy, establishes a dualism between the actual and the ideal against which the human mind easily rebels. Aristotle himself was hardly faithful to it. He tried to prove the existence of his God, and existence is something quite irrelevant to an ideal. This confusion is very excusable, especially in an age when the strictly mechanical view of Nature still seemed hopelessly inadequate. Aristotle consequently tried to understand the natural world by viewing it systematically from the point of view of moral science, as Plato had done less coherently in his myths; and hence came what we must regard as the great error of Aristotle's philosophy, the belief in the efficacy of final causes and in the preëxistence of entelechies. But, apart from this unhappy question of existence, which is, as we have said, irrelevant to an ideal, Aristotle's conception of God remains, perhaps, the most philosophical that has yet been constructed. Without any concessions to sentiment or superstition, it presents us with a sublime vision of the essentially human, of a nature as free from an unworthy anthropomorphism as from an inhuman abstractness. It is made both human and superhuman by the same principle of idealization. It is the final cause of Nature and man, the realization of their imminent upward effort, the essence that would contain all their values and escape all their imperfections.

We may well doubt, however, whether men in general will ever be ready to accept so austere a theology in guise of a religion; they were certainly not ready to do so at the end of the classical period. The inheritance of Paganism fell instead to Christianity, in which ethical and naturalistic elements were again united, although united in a new way. For, while the scheme of Paganism, and of all the philosophies that sought to rationalize Paganism, was cosmic and static, the scheme of Christianity was historical. They spoke of the dynamic relations of heaven and earth, or of the immutable hierarchy of ideas and essences; even Aristotle's God was somehow in spatial relations to the Universe which he set in motion. The religion of the Hebrews, on the other hand, had been essentially historical and civic: it had been concerned with the moral destinies of Israel and the dealings of Jehovah with his people. Christianity inherited this historical character; its mysteries occurred in time. Not only the redemption of the world but the vocation and sanctification of the individual were progressive, and when the habits and problems of Christian theology were carried over by the German idealists into the region of pure metaphysics, the systems they conceived were still systems of evolution. God was to be manifest in the development of things. For Christianity in its own way had spoken from the beginning of a gradual and yet to be completed descent of the divine into the natural by the agency of prophecy, law, and sacramental institutions; it had represented the relations of God to man in a vast historic drama, of which creation constituted the opening, the fall and redemption the nexus, and the last judgment the unravelling.

Thus appeared a new scheme for the unification of the natural and the moral. The harmony which the old religion had failed to establish in space and in Nature, the new sought to establish in history and in time. It was hoped that life and experience, sin and redemption, might manifest that divinity which had fled out of the sea and sky, and which it seemed sacrilege to identify any longer with the animal vitality of the universe. Whether the same criticism that disintegrated mythology and isolated its elements of science and of poetry would not be fatal to the new combination of the moral and the factual in the history of man, is hardly a question for us here. Suffice it to point out the problem and to register the solution which was found in the ancient world to the analogous problem that presented itself there. The first impulse of the imagination is always to combine in the object all the elements which lie together in the mind, to project them indiscriminately into a single conception of reality, enriched with as many qualities as there are phases and values in our experience. But these phases and values have diverse origins and do not permanently hang together. It becomes after a while impossible to keep them attached to a single image; they have to be distributed according to their true order and connections, some objectified into a physical universe of mechanism and law, others built into a system of rational objects, into a hierarchy of logical and moral ideas. So the lovely pantheon of the Greeks yielded in time to analysis and was dissolved into abstract science and conscious fable. So, too, the body and soul of later religions may come to be divided, when they render back to earth what they contain of positive history and to the heaven of man's indomitable idealism what they contain of aspiration and hope.