A people wedded to such conceptions were naturally ready enough to install new immortals of whom they had not known before, but reluctant to depose in their favour those whom they and their forefathers had known and served. Dangers were to be apprehended from neglect; blessings were to be secured by tendance. Greater honour might be paid to one god, less to another; but from no immortal should service be wholly withheld: even unconscious oversights should be remedied by offerings 'to an unknown god.' Such in its essence was the popular religion, inconsistent it may be and not deeply intellectual, but in sympathies very broad—broad enough to encompass the worship of all immortals, broad as the earth and the sky and the sea wherein they dwelt and moved.
So vital and so deep-seated in the hearts of the common-folk are these religious tendencies, that even at the present day when the word 'Christian' has become a popular synonym for 'Greek' in contradistinction not only with 'Mohammedan,' but even sometimes with 'Western' or 'Catholic' or with 'Protestant,' and when horror would be excited by any imputation of polytheism, there are yet recognised a large number of superhuman and for the most part immortal beings, whom the Church has been able neither to eradicate from the popular mind nor yet to incorporate under the form of saints or devils in her own theological system. These beings, whether benignant to man or maleficent, are all treated as divine. In ancient times the common people had probably little appreciation of the various grades of divinity; indeed it was one of the seven sages, we are told, who first differentiated God and the lesser deities and the heroes[1]; and at the present day the common-folk are certainly no more subtle of understanding than they were then. God and the Saints and these pagan powers are all feared and worshipped in the several ways traditionally suited to each; but the fact of worship proclaims them all alike to be gods.
The origin of the non-Christian deities, even if we were unable to identify any of them with the gods of classical Greece, would be clearly enough proved by some of the general terms under which all of them are included. Those who use these.]
- ↑ Stobaeus, Sentent. p. 279, [Greek: Prôtos Thalês diairei . . . eis theon, eis daimonas, eis hêrôas
