We cannot here touch upon the marvellous tales of Delos and of Delphi, nor repeat the strains that Pindar sang, sitting in his iron chair beside the shrine.  This much at least we may say, that both the Apollo of Delos and the Apollo of Delphi are foreign gods, each of whom appropriated to his own use a sacred place where the ancient earth-bound religion had already established its rites.  The Greeks brought with them a splendid god from their former home, but in his new shrine he was identified with a local god, very far from splendid; and this seems to be the most reasonable explanation of the inconsistency between the revolting and the beautiful elements in his worship.  Pindar at least repudiated the relics of the poorer cult, and cried concerning such stories as were current then, “Oh, my tongue, fling this tale from thee; it is a hateful cleverness that slanders gods.”  No one who has realised the power and glory of the Eastern sun, can wonder at the identification both of the good and bad symbolism with the orb of day.  Sun-worship is indeed a form of nature-worship, and there are physical reasons obvious enough for its being able to incorporate both the clean and unclean, both the deadly and the benign legends.  Yet there is a splendour in it which is seen in its attraction for such minds as those of Aurelian and Julian, and which is capable of refinement in the delicate spirituality of Mithra, that worship of the essential principle of light, the soul of sunshine.  In the worship of Apollo we have a combination, than which none on record is more striking, of the finest spirituality with the crudest paganism.

Here then, in the magical arena of the early world of Greece, we see in one of its most romantic forms the age-long strife between paganism and spirituality.  We have taken at random four of the most popular stories of Greece.  We have found in each of them pagan elements partly bequeathed by that earlier and lower earth-bound worship which preceded the Olympians, partly added in decadent days when the mind of man was turned from the heights and grovelling again.  But we have seen a deeper meaning in them, far further-reaching than any story of days and nights or of years and seasons.  It is a story of the aspiring spirit which is ever wistful here on the green earth (although that indeed is pleasant), and which finds its home among high thoughts, and ideas which dwell in heaven.  We shall see many aspects of the same twofold thought and life, as we move about from point to point among the literature of later days.  Yet we shall seldom find any phase of the conflict which has not been prophesied, or at least foreshadowed, in these legends of the dawn.  The link that binds the earliest to the latest page of literature is just that human nature which, through all changes of country and of time, remains essentially the same.  It is this which lends to our subject its individual as well as its historical interest.  The battle is for each of us our own battle, and its victories and defeats are our own.