to be divine. Even vegetable
organization had something sacred in it: "O holy nation," said the Roman
satirist, "whose gods grow in gardens!" That plastic force of nature which
appears in organic life and growth made up, in various forms, as we shall
see in the proper place, the Egyptian Pantheon. The life-force of nature
became divided into the three groups of gods, the highest of which
represented its largest generalizations. Kneph, Neith, Sevech, Pascht, are
symbols, according to Lepsius, of the World-Spirit, the World-Matter,
Space and Time. Each circle of the gods shows us some working of the
mysterious powers of nature, and of its occult laws. But when we come to
Greece, these personified laws turn into men. Everything in the Greek
Pantheon is human. All human tendencies appear transfigured into glowing
forms of light on Mount Olympus. The gods of Egypt are powers and laws;
those of Greece are persons.

The opposite tendencies of these antagonist forms of piety appear in the
development of Egyptian and Hellenic life. The gods of Egypt were
mysteries too far removed from the popular apprehension to be objects of
worship; and so religion in Egypt became priestcraft. In Greece, on the
other hand, the gods were too familiar, too near to the people, to be
worshipped with any real reverence. Partaking in all human faults and
vices, it must sooner or later come to pass that familiarity would breed
contempt. And as the religion of Egypt perished from being kept away from
the people, as an esoteric system in the hands of priests, that of Greece,
in which there was no priesthood as an order, came to an end because the
gods ceased to be objects of respect at all.

* * * * *

We see, from these examples, how each of the great ethnic religions tends
to a disproportionate and excessive, because one-sided, statement of some
divine truth or law. The question then emerges at this point: "Is
Christianity also one-sided, or does it contain in itself _all_ these
truths?" Is it _teres atque rotundus_, so as to be able to meet every
natural religion with a kindred truth, and thus to supply the defects of
each from its own fulness? If it can be shown to possess this amplitude,
it at once is placed by itself in an order of its own. It is not to be
classified with the other religions, since it does not share their one
family fault. In every other instance we can touch with our finger the
weak place, the em