ce and for all, the
father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost their point
and meaning. It is curious how near to monotheism, and to monotheism of
a very profound and impersonal type, the real religion of Greece came in
the sixth and fifth centuries. Many of the philosophers, Xenophanes,
Parmenides, and others, asserted it clearly or assumed it without
hesitation. Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, in their deeper moments point
the same road. Indeed a metaphysician might hold that their theology is
far deeper than that to which we are accustomed, since they seem not to
make any particular difference between +hoi theoi+ and +ho theos+ or +to
theion+. They do not instinctively suppose that the human distinctions
between 'he' and 'it', or between 'one' and 'many', apply to the divine.
Certainly Greek monotheism, had it really carried the day, would have
been a far more philosophic thing than the tribal and personal
monotheism of the Hebrews. But unfortunately too many hard-caked
superstitions, too many tender and sensitive associations, were linked
with particular figures in the pantheon or particular rites which had
brought the worshippers religious peace. If there had been some Hebrew
prophets about, and a tyrant or two, progressive and bloody-minded, to
agree with them, polytheism might perhaps actually have been stamped out
in Greece at one time. But Greek thought, always sincere and daring, was
seldom brutal, seldom ruthless or cruel. The thinkers of the great
period felt their own way gently to the Holy of Holies, and did not try
to compel others to take the same way. Greek theology, whether popular
or philosophical, seldom denied any god, seldom forbade any worship.
What it tried to do was to identify every new god with some aspect of
one of the old ones, and the result was naturally confusion. Apart from
the Epicurean school, which though powerful was always unpopular, the
religious thought of later antiquity for the most part took refuge in a
sort of apotheosis of good taste, in which the great care was not to
hurt other people's feelings, or else it collapsed into helpless
mysticism.

The attempt to make Olympianism a religion of the Polis failed also.
The Olympians did not belong to any particular city: they were too
universal; and no particular city had a very positive faith in them. The
actual Polis was real and tangible, the Homeric gods a little alien and
literary. The City herself was a most real