This religion is itself pagan, and
has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. It does not at
once, and for the majority, become the higher Hellenic religion.
The country people, of course, cherish the unlovely idols of an
earlier time, such as those which Pausanias found still devoutly
preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who,
coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy
presentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only
a shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder gods,
which, however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing
ever with the worshippers in whom they live and move and have
their being, borrow something of the lordliness and distinction of
human nature there. Greek religion too has its mendicants, its
purifications, its antinomian mysticism, its garments offered to
the gods, its statues worn with kissing, its exaggerated
superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its
addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or
melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by
Greek polytheism! What should [204] we have thought of the
vertiginous prophetess at the very centre of Greek religion? The
supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light across this
gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomes in a happier climate
clear and exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational,
chastened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always opposed
to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force
and spring of which Greek religion sublimes itself.
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