Greece, and India, like some of the legends of the Old Testament, served to confound moral distinctions, and encourage crime. Polytheists themselves confess it.[1] Yet a distinction seems often to have been made between the private and the official character of the deities. There was no devil, no pandemonium, in ancient classic Polytheism as in the modern Church. Antiquity has no such disgrace to bear. Perhaps the poetic fictions about the Gods were regarded always as fictions, and no more. Still this influence must have been pernicious.[2] It would seem, at first glance, that only strong intellectual insight, or great moral purity, or a happy combination of external circumstances, could free men from the evil. However, in forming the morals of a people, it is not so much the doctrine that penetrates and moves the nation's soul as it is the feeling of that sublimity which resides only in God, and of that enchanting loveliness which alone belongs to what is filled with God. Isocrates well called the mythological tales blasphemies against the Gods. Aristophanes exposes in public the absurdities which were honoured in the recesses of the temples. The priesthood in Greece has no armour of offence against ridicule.[3] But goodness never dies out of man's heart.
Mankind pass slowly from stage to stage:—
“Slowly as spreads the green of Earth
O'er the receding Ocean's bed,
Dim as the distant Stars come forth,
Uncertain as a vision fled,”
seems the gradual progress of the race. But in the midst of the absurd doctrines of the priests, and the immoral tales wherewith mistaken poets sought to adorn their conception of God, pure hearts beat, and lofty minds rose
- ↑ Xenophanes, a contemporary of Pythagoras, censures Homer and Hesiod for their narratives of the Gods, imputing to them what it was shameful for a man to think of. See Karsten, Phil. vett. Reliquia, Vol. I. p. 43, et seq. See Plato, Repub. II. p. 377; Pindar, Olymp. I. 28. But no religion was ever designed to favour impurity, even when it allows it in the Gods. See the fine remarks of Seneca, De Vita beata, Ch. XXVI. § 5, 6. Even the Gods were subject to the eternal laws. Fate punished Zeus for each offence. He smarted at home for his infidelity abroad.
- ↑ See the classic passages in Aristophanes, Clouds, 1065, et seq.
- ↑ It still remains unexplained how the Athenians, on a religious festival, could applaud the exhibitions of the comic drama, which exposed the popular mythology to ridicule, as it is done in the Birds of Aristophanes—to mention a single example—and still continue the popular worship.
