not very much wiser or better.  All their own tendencies they beheld reflected in their deities.  They projected themselves upon the heavens, and saw with pleasure a race of divine Greeks in the skies above, corresponding with the Greeks below.  A delicious religion; without austerity, asceticism, or terror; a religion filled with forms of beauty and nobleness, kindred to their own; with gods who were capricious indeed, but never stern, and seldom jealous or very cruel.  It was a heaven so near at hand, that their own heroes had climbed into it, and become demigods.  It was a heaven peopled with such a variety of noble forms, that they could choose among them the protector whom they liked best, and possibly themselves be selected as favorites by some guardian deity.  The fortunate hunter, of a moonlight night, might even behold the graceful figure of Diana flashing through the woods in pursuit of game, and the happy inhabitant of Cyprus come suddenly on the fair form of Venus resting in a laurel-grove.  The Dryads could be seen glancing among the trees, the Oreads heard shouting on the mountains, and the Naiads found asleep by the side of their streams.  If the Greek chose, he could take his gods from the poets; if he liked it better, he could find them among the artists; or if neither of these suited him, he might go to the philosophers for his deities.

The Greek religion, therefore, did not guide or restrain, it only stimulated.  The Greek, by intercourse with Greek gods, became more a Greek than ever.  Every Hellenic feeling and tendency was personified and took a divine form; which divine form reacted on the tendency to develop it still further.  All this contributed unquestionably to that wonderful phenomenon, Greek development.  Nowhere on the earth, before or since, has the human being been educated into such a wonderful perfection, such an entire and total unfolding of itself, as in Greece.  There, every human tendency and faculty of soul and body opened in symmetrical proportion.  That small country, so insignificant on the map of Europe, so invisible on the map of the world, carried to perfection in a few short centuries every human art.  Everything in Greece is art; because everything is finished, done perfectly well.  In that garden of the world ripened the masterpieces of epic, tragic, comic, lyric, didactic poetry; the masterpieces in every school of philosophic investigation; the masterpieces of history, of oratory, of mathematics; the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting.  Greece developed every form of human government, and in Greece were fought and won the great battles of the world.  Before Greece, everything in human literature and art was a rude and imperfect attempt; since Greece, everything has been a rude and imperfect imitation.

Sec. 3.  The Gods of Greece before Homer.

The Theogony of Hesiod, or Book of Genesis of the Greek gods, gives us the history of three generations of deities.  First come the Uranids; secondly, the Titans; and thirdly, the gods of Olympus.  Beginning as powers of nature, they end as persons.[218]