n
which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any
respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only
an accident--though perhaps an invariable accident--that all the
supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious you may consider
the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and
possibly seen by others better than by you. You know that all your
creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts to use human
language for a purpose for which it was never made. Your concepts are,
by the nature of things, inadequate; the truth is not in you but beyond
you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. Something like this,
I take it, was the character of the Olympian Religion in the higher
minds of later Greece. Its gods could awaken man's worship and
strengthen his higher aspirations; but at heart they knew themselves to
be only metaphors. As the most beautiful image carved by man was not the
god, but only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the god;[77:1] so
the god himself, when conceived, was not the reality but only a symbol
to help towards conceiving the reality. That was the work set before
them. Meantime they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no
commands that made man sin against his own inner light.

FOOTNOTES:

[39:1] Hdt. i. 60 +epei ge apekrithe ek palaiterou tou barbarou ethneos
to Hellenikon eon kai dexioteron kai euethies elithiou apellagmenon
mallon.+ As to the date here suggested for the definite dawn of
Hellenism Mr. Edwyn Bevan writes to me: 'I have often wondered what the
reason is that about that time a new age began all over the world that
we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the
Zoroastrian Aryans; in India it was the time of Buddha, in China of
Confucius.' +Euethie elithios+ is almost '_Urdummheit_'.

[40:1] See in general Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i; Leaf,
_Companion to Homer_, Introduction: _R. G. E._, chap. ii; Chadwick, _The
Heroic Age_ (last four chapters); and J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_,
chaps. viii and ix.

[40:2] Since writing the above I find in Vandal, _L'Avenement de
Bonaparte_, p. 20, in Nelson's edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary
soldiers: 'Ils se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates .
. . et ils creaient un type de haute vertu guerriere, quand ils
croyaient seulement le reproduire.'

[41:1] Hdt. i. 56 f.; Th. i. 3 (Hellen s