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, [201] 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.
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