ere came the
notion that they did not dwell in houses made with hands; yet a Greek
temple, just like a mediaeval cathedral, might be made beautiful as a
pleasing service and an honour to the deity to whom it was dedicated;
and there was a continuous tradition in practice from the lower
conception to the higher, nor is it easy to draw the line at any
particular stage between the two.

If we turn now to the sacred image of the deity we find the same process
going on. The rude stock or stone was sometimes itself the actual
recipient of material offerings; or it might be painted with some bright
and pleasing colour, or wrapped in costly draperies. In most of these
customs an assumption is implied that the object of worship is pleased
by the same things as please its worshippers; and here we find the germ
of the anthropomorphic idea. It was probably the desire to make the
offerings and prayers of the worshippers perceptible to the power within
that first led to the addition of human features to the shapeless block.
Just as the early Greeks painted eyes upon the prows of their ships, to
enable them to find their way through the water, so they carved a head,
with eyes and ears, out of the sacred stone or stock, or perhaps added a
head to the original shapeless mass. We find many primitive idols in
this form--a cone or column with a head and perhaps arms and feet added
to it; and the tradition survives in the herm, or in the mask of
Dionysus attached to a post, round which we still see the Maenads
dancing on fifth-century vases. The notion that such carved eyes or ears
actually served to transmit impressions to the god is well illustrated
by Professor Petrie's discovery at Memphis of a number of votive ears of
the god, intended to facilitate or to symbolise his reception of the
prayers of his votaries. In fact, the taunt of the psalmist against the
images of the heathen--"Eyes have they, but they see not; they have
ears, and yet they hear not"--is not a merely rhetorical one, as it
seems to us, but real and practical, if spoken to men who gave their
gods ears and eyes that they might hear and see.

An imagination so entirely materialistic may belong to a more primitive
stage than any we can find among the Greeks. As soon as religion has
reached the polytheistic stage the gods are regarded as travelling from
image to image, just as they travel from temple to temple. Even in
AEschylus' _Eumenides_ it will be remembered that when