r of as much charm, five
hundred years before, Herodotus, who was not so sure about all the
oracles. But let us think what it means,--to look back over three
thousand years of one faith, unbroken. Egyptian religion had been
unchallenged for longer still, even if we allow Plutarch's three
thousand years. The oldest remains in Egypt antedate, we are told,
4000 B.C., and all through history, with the exception of the
solitary reign of Amen-Hotep III., Egypt worshipped the same gods,
with additions, as time went on. Again an unbroken tradition. And
how long, under various names, had Cybele, Mother of Gods, been
worshipped in Asia? By our era all these religions were fused into
one religion, of many cults and rites and ancient traditions; and
the incredible weight of old tradition in that world is hard to
overestimate.

The old religion was strong in the splendour of its art and its
architecture. The severe, beautiful lines of the Greek temple are
familiar to us still; and, until I saw the Taj, I think I should
have doubted whether there could be anything more beautiful.
Architecture was consecrated to the gods, and so was art. You go to
Delphi, said Plutarch, and see those wonderful works of the ancient
artists and sculptors, as fresh still as if they had left the chisel
yesterday, and they had stood there for hundreds of years, wonderful
in their beauty. Think of some of the remains of the Greek art--of
that Victory, for instance, which the Messenians set on the temple
at Olympia in 421 B.C. She stood on a block of stone on the temple,
but the block was painted blue, so that, as the spectator came up,
he saw the temple and the angle of its roof, and then a gap of blue
sky and the goddess just alighting on the summit of the temple. From
what is left of her, broken and headless, but still beautiful, we
can picture her flying through the air--the wind has blown her dress
back against her, and you see its folds freshly caught by the
breeze. And all this the artist had disentangled from a rough block
of stone--so vivid was his conception of the goddess, and so sure
his hand. There are those who say that the conventional picture of
God of the great artists is moulded after the Zeus of Pheidias.
Egypt again had other portrayals of the gods--on a pattern of her
own, strange and massive and huge, far older. About six hundred
years before Christ the Egyptian King, Psammetichos (Psem Tek),
hired Greek soldiers and marched them hund