his reality helps to
concentrate our attention on his nature, and thus to develope and
enrich our idea. The belief in the reality of an ideal personality
brings about its further idealization. Had it ever occurred to any
Greek seer to attribute events to the influence of Achilles, or to
offer sacrifices to him in the heat of the enthusiasm kindled by the
thought of his beauty and virtue, the legend of Achilles, now
become a god, would have grown and deepened; it would have
been moralized like the legend of Hercules, or naturalized like that
of Persephone, and what is now but a poetic character of
extraordinary force and sublimity would have become the adored
patron of generation after generation, and a manifestation of the
divine man.

Achilles would then have been as significant and unforgettable a
figure as Apollo or his sister, as Zeus, Athena, and the other
greater gods. If ever, while that phase of religion lasted, his
character had been obscured and his features dimmed, he would
have been recreated by every new votary: poets would never have
tired of singing his praises, or sculptors of rendering his form.
When, after the hero had been the centre and subject of so much
imaginative labour, the belief in his reality lapsed, to be transferred
to some other conception of cosmic power, he would have
remained an ideal of poetry and art, and a formative influence of
all cultivated minds. This he is still, like all the great creations of
avowed fiction, but he would have been immensely more so, had
belief in his reality kept the creative imagination continuously
intent upon his nature.

The reader can hardly fail to see that all this applies with equal
force to the Christian conception of the sacred personalities. Christ,
the Virgin Mary, and the saints may have been exactly what our
imagination pictures them to be; that is entirely possible; nor can I
see that it is impossible that the conceptions of other religions
might themselves have actual counterparts somewhere in the
universe. That is a question of faith and empirical evidence with
which we are not here concerned. But however descriptive of truth
our conceptions may be, they have evidently grown up in our
minds by an inward process of development. The materials of
history and tradition have been melted and recast by the devout
imagination into those figures in the presence of which our piety
lives.

That is the reason why the reconstructed logical gods of t