less elusive form, as well as some definite association with conscience, if it is to be defended against the pull of the green earth.  It has been well said that, for the Greek, God was the view; but when the traveller goes forward into the view, he meets with many things which it is dangerous to identify with God.  For the young spirit of the early times the temptation to earthliness was overwhelming.  The world was fair, its gates were open, and its barriers all down.  Men took from literature and from religion just as much of spirituality as they understood and as little as they desired, and the effect was swift and inevitable in that degeneration which reached its final form in the degraded sensuality of the later Roman Empire.

The confusing element in all such inquiry lies in the fact that one can never get an unmixed paganism nor a perfect idealism.  Just as the claims of body and spirit are in our daily life inextricably interwoven, so the Greek thought hung precariously between the two, and was always more or less at the mercy of the individual interpreter and of the relative strength of his tastes and passions.  So we shall find it all through the course of these studies.  It would be preposterous to deny some sort of idealism to almost any pagan who has ever lived.  The contrast between pagan and idealist is largely a matter of proportion and preponderating tendency:  yet the lines are clear enough to enable us to work with this distinction and to find it valuable and illuminating.

The fundamental fact to remember in studying any of the myths of Greece is, that we have here a composite and not a simple system of thought and imagination.  There are always at least two layers:  the primitive, and the Olympian which came later.  The primitive conceptions were those afforded by the worship of ghosts, of dead persons, and of animals.  Miss Jane Harrison has pointed out in great detail the primitive elements which lingered on through the Olympian worship.  Perhaps the most striking instance which she quotes is the Anthesteria, or festival of flowers, at the close of which the spirits were dismissed with the formula, “Depart, ye ghosts, the revels now are ended.”  Mr. Andrew Lang has suggested that the animals associated with gods and goddesses (such as the mouse which is found in the hand, or the hair, or beside the feet of the statues of Apollo, the owl of Minerva, etc.) are relics of the earlier worship.  This would satisfactorily explain much of the disreputable element which lingered on side by side with the noble thoughts of Greek religion.  The Olympians, a splendid race of gods, representing the highest human ideals, arrived with the Greeks; but for the sake of safety, or of old association, the primitive worship was retained and blended with the new.  In the extreme case of human sacrifice, it was retained in the form of surrogates—­little wooden images, or even actual animals, being sacrificed in lieu of the older