, all have their long spiritual
history. They are but little impeded by the echoes of the old frivolous
mythology; still less by any local roots or sectional prejudices or
compulsory details of ritual. As the more highly educated mind of Greece
emerged from a particular, local, tribal, conception of religion, the
old denationalized Olympians were ready to receive her.

The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have said, a devotion
to the City itself. It is expressed often in Aeschylus and Sophocles,
again and again with more discord and more criticism in Euripides and
Plato; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias and the Troades bear
the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic. It is
expressed best perhaps, and that without mention of the name of a single
god, in the great Funeral Speech of Pericles. It is higher than most
modern patriotism because it is set upon higher ideals. It is more
fervid because the men practising it lived habitually nearer to the
danger-point, and, when they spoke of dying for the City, spoke of a
thing they had faced last week and might face again to-morrow. It was
more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is
clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the
mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no
words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its
mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have
recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a
religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a
particular people. As soon as the Stoics had proclaimed the world to be
'one great City of gods and men', the only Gods with which Greece could
satisfactorily people that City were the idealized band of the old
Olympians.

They are artists' dreams, ideals, allegories; they are symbols of
something beyond themselves. They are Gods of half-rejected tradition,
of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom
doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as
to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not gods in
whom any one believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? Or is it
just the other way? Is it perhaps that one difference between Religion
and Superstition lies exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its
worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, o