not in heart.  He had created his gods in his own image, and they were—­what they were.  There was no goodness in his religion, and we can tolerate it only as it is developed in the Homeric rhapsodies, in the far-off fable-time of the old world, and amongst men who were but partially self-conscious.  In that remote Homeric epoch it is tolerable, when cattle-stealing and war were the chief employments of the ruling caste,—­and we may add, woman-stealing, into the bargain.  “I did not come to fight against the Trojans,” says Achilles, “because I had suffered any grievance at their hands.  They never drove off my oxen and horses or stole my harvests in rich-soiled Phthia, the nurse of heroes; for vale-darkening mountains and a tumultuous sea separate us.”

Into that old Homeric world we enter through the portals of the “Ilias” and “Odusseia,” and see the peaks of Olympus shining afar off in white splendor like silvery clouds, not looking for or expecting either a loftier or a purer heaven.  Somewhere on the bounds of the dim ocean-world we know that there is an exiled court, a faded sort of St. Germain celestial dynasty, geologic gods, coevals of the old Silurian strata,—­to wit, Kronos, Rhea, Nox, et al. Here these old, unsceptred, discrowned, and sky-fallen potentates “cogitate in their watery ooze,” and in “the shady sadness of vales,”—­sometimes visited by their successors for counsel or concealment, or for the purpose of establishing harmony amongst them.  The Sleep and Death of the Homeric mythology were naturally gentle divinities,—­sometimes lifting the slain warrior from the field of his fame, and bearing him softly through the air to his home and weeping kindred.  This was a gracious office.  The saintly legends of the Roman Church have borrowed a hint from this old Homeric fancy.  One pleasant feature of the Homeric battles is, that, when some blameless, great-souled champion falls, the blind old bard interrupts the performances for a moment and takes his reader with him away from the din and shouting of the battle, following, as it were, the spirit of the fallen hero to his distant abode, where sit his old father, his spouse, and children,—­thus throwing across the cloud of battle a sweet gleam of domestic, pastoral life, to relieve its gloom.  Homer, both in the “Ilias” and “Odusseia,” gives his readers frequent glimpses into the halls of Olympus; for messengers are continually flashing to and fro, like meteors, between the throne of Zeus and the earth.  Sometimes it is Hermes sandalled with down; sometimes it is wind-footed Iris, who is winged with the emerald plumes of the rainbow; and sometimes it is Oneiros, or a Dream, that glides down to earth, hooded and veiled, through the shadow of night, bearing the behests of Jove.  But however often we are permitted to return to the ambrosial homestead of the ever-living gods in the wake of returning messengers, we always find it the same calm region, lifted far up above the turbulence, the perturbations, the clouds and storms of