reds of miles up the Nile.
The Greek soldiers, one idle day, carved their names on the legs of
the colossal gods seated at Abu Symbel. Their names are found there
to-day. So old are these gods.

The religion was strong in the splendour of its ceremony. Every year
the Athenian people went to Eleusis in splendid procession to
worship, to be initiated into the rites of the Earth-Mother and her
virgin daughter, who had taught men the use of grain and the arts of
farming-rites linked with an immemorial past, awful rites that gave
men a new hope of eternal life. The Mother of the Gods, from Phrygia
in Asia Minor, had her rites, too; and her cult spread all over the
world. When the Roman poet, Lucretius, wants to describe the wonder
and magic of the pageant of Nature in the spring-time he goes to the
pomp of Cybele. The nearest thing to it which we can imagine is
Botticelli's picture of the Triumph of Spring. Lucretius was a poet
to whom the gods were idle and irrelevant; yet to that pageant he
goes for a picture of the miraculous life of nature. More splendid
still were the rites of the Egyptian Isis, celebrated all over the
world. Her priests, shaven and linen-clad, carried symbols of an
unguessed antiquity and magical power. They launched a boat with a
flame upon it--on the river in Egypt, on the sea in Greece. All
these cults made deep impressions on the worshippers, as our records
tell us. The appeal of religious emotion was noticed by Aristotle,
who remarked, however, that it was rather feeling than intellect
that was touched--a shrewd criticism that deserves to be remembered
still.

The gods were strong in their actual manifestations of themselves.
Apollo for ninety generations had spoken in Delphi. At Epidauros
there was a shrine of Asclepias. Its monuments have been collected
and edited by Dr. Caton of Liverpool. There sick men and women came,
lived a quiet life of diet and religious ceremony, preparing for the
night on which they should sleep in the temple. On that night the
god came to them, they said, in that mood or state where they lay
"between asleep and awake, sometimes as in a dream and then as in a
waking vision--one's hair stood on end, but one shed tears of joy
and felt light-hearted." Others said they definitely saw him. He
came and told them what to do; on waking they did it and were
healed; or he touched them then and there, and cured them as they
lay. Some of the cures recorded on the monuments are p