and without calling out exalted sentiments of love or reverence.  They are all creations of the imagination, invested with human traits and adapted to the genius of the people, who were far from being religious in the sense that the Hindus and Egyptians were.  It was the natural and not the supernatural that filled their souls.  It was art they worshipped, and not the God who created the heavens and the earth, and who exacts of his creatures obedience and faith.

In regard to the gods and goddesses of the Grecian Pantheon, we observe that most of them were immoral; at least they had the usual infirmities of men.  They are thus represented by the poets, probably to please the people, who like all other peoples had to make their own conceptions of God; for even a miraculous revelation of deity must be interpreted by those who receive it, according to their own understanding of the qualities revealed.  The ancient Romans, themselves stern, earnest, practical, had an almost Oriental reverence for their gods, so that their Jupiter (Father of Heaven) was a majestic, powerful, all-seeing, severely just national deity, regarded by them much as the Jehovah of the Hebrews was by that nation.  When in later times the conquest of Eastern countries and of Macedon and Greece brought in luxury, works of art, foreign literature, and all the delightful but enervating influences of aestheticism, the Romans became corrupted, and gradually began to identify their own more noble deities with the beautiful but unprincipled, self-indulgent, and tricky set of gods and goddesses of the Greek mythology.

The Greek Zeus, with whom were associated majesty and dominion, and who reigned supreme in the celestial hierarchy,—­who as the chief god of the skies, the god of storms, ruler of the atmosphere, was the favorite deity of the Aryan race, the Indra of the Hindus, the Jupiter of the Romans,—­was in his Grecian presentment a rebellious son, a faithless husband, and sometimes an unkind father.  His character was a combination of weakness and strength,—­anything but a pattern to be imitated, or even to be reverenced.  He was the impersonation of power and dignity, represented by the poets as having such immense strength that if he had hold of one end of a chain, and all the gods held the other, with the earth fastened to it, he would be able to move them all.

Poseidon (Roman Neptune), the brother of Zeus, was represented as the god of the ocean, and was worshipped chiefly in maritime States.  His morality was no higher than that of Zeus; moreover, he was rough, boisterous, and vindictive.  He was hostile to Troy, and yet persecuted Ulysses.

Apollo, the next great personage of the Olympian divinities, was more respectable morally than his father.  He was the sun-god of the Greeks, and was the embodiment of divine prescience, of healing skill, of musical and poetical productiveness, and hence the favorite of the poets.  He had a form of ideal beauty, grace, and vigor, inspired by unerring wisdom and insight into futurity.  He was obedient to the will of Zeus, to whom he was not much inferior in power.  Temples were erected to this favorite deity in every part of Greece, and he was supposed to deliver oracular responses in several cities, especially at Delphos.