As a future state of rewards and punishments seldom entered into the minds of the Greeks, so the gods are never represented as conferring future salvation.  The welfare of the soul was rarely thought of where there was no settled belief in immortality.  The gods themselves were fed on nectar and ambrosia, that they might not die like ordinary mortals.  They might prolong their own existence indefinitely, but they were impotent to confer eternal life upon their worshippers; and as eternal life is essential to perfect happiness, they could not confer even happiness in its highest sense.

On this fact Saint Augustine erected the grand fabric of his theological system.  In his most celebrated work, “The City of God,” he holds up to derision the gods of antiquity, and with blended logic and irony makes them contemptible as objects of worship, since they were impotent to save the soul.  In his view the grand and distinguishing feature of Christianity, in contrast with Paganism, is the gift of eternal life and happiness.  It is not the morality which Christ and his Apostles taught, which gave to Christianity its immeasurable superiority over all other religions, but the promise of a future felicity in heaven.  And it was this promise which gave such comfort to the miserable people of the old Pagan world, ground down by oppression, injustice, cruelty, and poverty.  It was this promise which filled the converts to Christianity with joy, enthusiasm, and hope,—­yea, more than this, even boundless love that salvation was the gift of God through the self-sacrifice of Christ.  Immortality was brought to light by the gospel alone, and to miserable people the idea of eternal bliss after the trials of mortal life were passed was the source of immeasurable joy.  No sooner was this sublime expectation of happiness planted firmly in the minds of pagans, than they threw their idols to the moles and the bats.

But even in regard to morality, Augustine showed that the gods were no examples to follow.  He ridicules their morals and their offices as severely as he points out their impotency to bestow happiness.  He shows the absurdity and inconsistency of tolerating players in their delineation of the vices and follies of deities for the amusement of the people in the theatre, while the priests performed the same obscenities as religious rites in the temples which were upheld by the State; so that philosophers like Varro could pour contempt on players with impunity, while he dared not ridicule priests for doing in the temples the same things.  No wonder that the popular religion at last was held in contempt by philosophers, since it was not only impotent to save, but did not stimulate to ordinary morality, to virtue, or to lofty sentiments.  A religion which was held sacred in one place and ridiculed in another, before the eyes of the same people, could not in the end but yield to what was better.

If we ascribe to the poets the creation of the elaborate mythology of the Greeks,—­that is, a system of gods made by men, rather than men made by gods,—­whether as symbols or objects of worship, whether the religion was pantheistic or idolatrous, we find that artists even surpassed the poets in their conceptions of divine power, goodness, and beauty, and thus riveted the chains which the poets forged.