ardly understand how
the purest of 'pure scholars' can fail to feel his knowledge enriched by
the savants who have compelled us to dig below the surface of our
classical tradition and to realize the imaginative and historical
problems which so often lie concealed beneath the smooth security of a
verbal 'construe'. My own essays do not for a moment claim to speak with
authority on a subject which is still changing and showing new facets
year by year. They only claim to represent the way of regarding certain
large issues of Greek Religion which has gradually taken shape, and has
proved practically helpful and consistent with facts, in the mind of a
very constant, though unsystematic, reader of many various periods of
Greek literature.

In the first essay my debt to Miss Harrison is great and obvious. My
statement of one or two points is probably different from hers, but in
the main I follow her lead. And in either case I cannot adequately
describe the advantage I have derived from many years of frequent
discussion and comparison of results with a Hellenist whose learning and
originality of mind are only equalled by her vivid generosity towards
her fellow-workers.

The second may also be said to have grown out of Miss Harrison's
writings. She has by now made the title of 'Olympian' almost a term of
reproach, and thrown down so many a scornful challenge to the canonical
gods of Greece, that I have ventured on this attempt to explain their
historical origin and plead for their religious value. When the essay
was already written I read Mr. Chadwick's impressive book on _The Heroic
Age_ (Cambridge, 1912), and was delighted to find in an author whose
standpoint and equipment are so different from mine so much that
confirmed or clarified my own view.

The title of the third essay I owe to a conversation with Professor J.
B. Bury. We were discussing the change that took place in Greek thought
between, say, Plato and the Neo-Platonists, or even between Aristotle
and Posidonius, and which is seen at its highest power in the Gnostics.
I had been calling it a rise of asceticism, or mysticism, or religious
passion, or the like, when my friend corrected me. 'It is not a rise; it
is a fall or failure of something, a sort of failure of nerve.'--We are
treading here upon somewhat firmer ground than in the first two essays.
The field for mere conjecture is less: we are supported more
continuously by explicit documents. Yet the subject i