The temple of Zeus at Olympia in Elis, where the intellect and the culture of Greece assembled every four years to witness the games instituted in honor of the Father of the gods, was itself calculated to impose on the senses of the worshippers by its grandeur and beauty.  The image of the god himself, sixty feet high, made of ivory, gold, and gems by the greatest of all the sculptors of antiquity, must have impressed spectators with ideas of strength and majesty even more than any poetical descriptions could do.  If it was art which the Greeks worshipped rather than an unseen deity who controlled their destinies, and to whom supreme homage was due, how nobly did the image before them represent the highest conceptions of the attributes to be ascribed to the King of Heaven!  Seated on his throne, with the emblems of sovereignty in his hands and attendant deities around him, his head, neck, breast, and arms in massive proportions, and his face expressive of majesty and sweetness, power in repose, benevolence blended with strength,—­the image of the Olympian deity conveyed to the minds of his worshippers everything that could inspire awe, wonder, and goodness, as well as power.  No fear was blended with admiration, since his favor could be won by the magnificent rites and ceremonies which were instituted in his honor.

Clarke alludes to the sculptured Apollo Belvedere as giving a still more elevated idea of the sun-god than the poets themselves,—­a figure expressive of the highest thoughts of the Hellenic mind,—­and quotes Milman in support of his admiration:—­

     “All, all divine! no struggling muscle glows,
     Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows;
     But, animate with deity alone,
     In deathless glory lives the breathing stone.”

If a Christian poet can see divinity in the chiselled stone, why should we wonder at the worship of art by the pagan Greeks?  The same could be said of the statues of Artemis, of Pallas-Athene, of Aphrodite, and other “divine” productions of Grecian artists, since they represented the highest ideal the world has seen of beauty, grace, loveliness, and majesty, which the Greeks adored.  Hence, though the statues of the gods are in human shape, it was not men that the Greeks worshipped, but those qualities of mind and those forms of beauty to which the cultivated intellect instinctively gave the highest praise.  No one can object to this boundless admiration which the Greeks had for art in its highest forms, in so far as that admiration became worship.  It was the divorce of art from morals which called out the indignation and censure of the Christian fathers, and even undermined the religion of philosophers so far as it had been directed to the worship of the popular deities, which were simply creations of poets and artists.