wind has blown her dress back against her, and you see its folds freshly caught by the breeze.  And all this the artist had disentangled from a rough block of stone—­so vivid was his conception of the goddess, and so sure his hand.  There are those who say that the conventional picture of God of the great artists is moulded after the Zeus of Pheidias.  Egypt again had other portrayals of the gods—­on a pattern of her own, strange and massive and huge, far older.  About six hundred years before Christ the Egyptian King, Psammetichos (Psem Tek), hired Greek soldiers and marched them hundreds of miles up the Nile.  The Greek soldiers, one idle day, carved their names on the legs of the colossal gods seated at Abu Symbel.  Their names are found there to-day.  So old are these gods.

The religion was strong in the splendour of its ceremony.  Every year the Athenian people went to Eleusis in splendid procession to worship, to be initiated into the rites of the Earth-Mother and her virgin daughter, who had taught men the use of grain and the arts of farming-rites linked with an immemorial past, awful rites that gave men a new hope of eternal life.  The Mother of the Gods, from Phrygia in Asia Minor, had her rites, too; and her cult spread all over the world.  When the Roman poet, Lucretius, wants to describe the wonder and magic of the pageant of Nature in the spring-time he goes to the pomp of Cybele.  The nearest thing to it which we can imagine is Botticelli’s picture of the Triumph of Spring.  Lucretius was a poet to whom the gods were idle and irrelevant; yet to that pageant he goes for a picture of the miraculous life of nature.  More splendid still were the rites of the Egyptian Isis, celebrated all over the world.  Her priests, shaven and linen-clad, carried symbols of an unguessed antiquity and magical power.  They launched a boat with a flame upon it—­on the river in Egypt, on the sea in Greece.  All these cults made deep impressions on the worshippers, as our records tell us.  The appeal of religious emotion was noticed by Aristotle, who remarked, however, that it was rather feeling than intellect that was touched—­a shrewd criticism that deserves to be remembered still.

The gods were strong in their actual manifestations of themselves.  Apollo for ninety generations had spoken in Delphi.  At Epidauros there was a shrine of Asclepias.  Its monuments have been collected and edited by Dr. Caton of Liverpool.  There sick men and women came, lived a quiet life of diet and religious ceremony, preparing for the night on which they should sleep in the temple.  On that night the god came to them, they said, in that mood or state where they lay “between asleep and awake, sometimes as in a dream and then as in a waking vision—­one’s hair stood on end, but one shed tears of joy and felt light-hearted.”  Others said they definitely saw him.  He came and told them what to do; on waking they did it and were healed; or he touched them then and there, and