balm to human sorrow.  The daemons who wandered in human shape over the classic lands of old were all fickle and malevolent.  They oftentimes impelled their victims to suicide.  The ghouls that haunt the tombs and waste places of the regions where they were once worshipped are their lineal descendants and modern representatives.  The vampires and pest-hags of the Levant are their successors in malignity.  The fair humanities of the old religion were fair only in shape and exterior.  The old pagan gods were friendly only to kings, heroes, and grandees; they had no beatitude for the poor and lowly.  Human despair, under their dispensation, knew no alleviation but a plunge from light and life into the underworld, —­rather than be monarch of which, the shade of Achilles avers, in the “Odusseia,” that it would prefer to be the hireling and drudge of some poor earthly peasant.  Elysium was only for a privileged few.

It has been said that the old ethnic creeds were the true religion “growing wild,”—­that the human soil was prepared by such kind of spiritual crops and outgrowths, with their tares and weeds intermingled with wheat, for the seed that was finally to be sown by the Divine Sower,—­that, erroneous as they were in a thousand respects, they were genuine emanations of the religious nature in man, and as such not to be stigmatized or harshly characterized,—­that without them the human soil could not have been made ready for the crop of unmixed truth.  This may be true of some of them, though surely not of the popular form of the old Greek ethnic faith.  Its deities were nothing better than the passions of human nature projected upon ethereal heights, and incarnated and made personal in undecaying demonic shapes,—­not conditioned and straitened like the bodies of man, but enjoying perpetual youth and immunity from death in most cases, with permission to take liberties with Space and Time greater even than are granted to us by steam and telegraph-wires.

The vulgar Grecian polytheism was all material.  It had no martyrs and confessors.  It was not worth dying for, as it was good for nothing to live by.  The religion of Hellas was the religion of sensualistic beauty simply.  It was just the worship for Pheidias and Praxiteles, for the bard of Teos and the soft Catullus, for sensual poet, painter, and sculptor.  But “the blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle,” although we gather most of our knowledge of Olympus and the Olympians from his verse, was worthy of a loftier and purer heaven than the low one under which he wandered from city to city, singing the tale of Troy divine, and hymns and paeans to the gods.  The good and the true were mere metaphysical abstractions to the old Greek.  What must he have been when it would not have been safe for him to leave his wife alone with the best and highest of his gods?  The ancient Hellenes were morally most vicious and depraved, even when compared with contemporary heathen nations.  The old Greek was large in brain, but