Now, there have as yet been three distinct schools of European architecture.  I say, European, because Asiatic and African architectures belong so entirely to other races and climates, that there is no question of them here; only, in passing, I will simply assure you that whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus.  We Europeans, then, have had three great religions:  the Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the Mediaeval, which was the worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation; the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty:  these three we have had—­they are past,—­and now, at last, we English have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I want to ask you.  But I must explain these three old ones first.

I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God of Wisdom; so that whatever contended against their religion,—­to the Jews a stumbling-block,—­was, to the Greeks—­Foolishness.[212]

The first Greek idea of deity was that expressed in the word, of which we keep the remnant in our words “Di-urnal” and “Di-vine”—­the god of Day, Jupiter the revealer.  Athena is his daughter, but especially daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the head.  We are only with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols:  but I may note rapidly, that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she often, in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left hand, for better guard; and the Gorgon, on her shield, are both representative mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it were), of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge—­that knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child.  For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear.[213]

This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity; and every habit of life, and every form of his art developed themselves from the seeking this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; and setting himself, as a man, to do things evermore rightly and strongly;[214] not with any ardent affection or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and continent energy of will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin there was no remission.  And the Greek architecture rose unerring, bright, clearly defined, and self-contained.