ings of
the intellect. Always, the fixed element is the religious observance; the
fluid, unfixed element is the myth, the religious conception. This
religion is itself pagan, and has in any broad view of it the pagan
sadness. It does not at once, and for the majority, become the higher
Hellenic religion. The country people, of course, cherish the unlovely
idols of an earlier time, such as those which Pausanias found still
devoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who,
coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy
presentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only a
shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder gods, which,
however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing ever with the
worshippers in whom they live and move and have their being, borrow
something of the lordliness and distinction of human nature there. Greek
religion too has its mendicants, its purifications, its antinomian
mysticism, its garments offered to the gods, its statues worn with
kissing, its exaggerated superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship
of sorrow, its addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or
melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by Greek
polytheism! What should we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess at
the very centre of Greek religion? The supreme Hellenic culture is a
sharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomes
in a happier region clear and exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo,
rational, chastened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always opposed
to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force and
spring of which Greek religion sublimes itself. Out of Greek religion,
under happy conditions, arises Greek art, to minister to human culture.
It was the privilege of Greek religion to be able to transform itself
into an artistic ideal.

For the thoughts of the Greeks about themselves, and their relation to
the world generally, were ever in the happiest readiness to be
transformed into objects for the senses. In this lies the main
distinction between Greek art and the mystical art of the Christian
middle age, which is always struggling to express thoughts beyond itself.
Take, for instance, a characteristic work of the middle age, Angelico's
Coronation of the Virgin, in the cloister of Saint Mark's at Florence. In
some strange halo of a moon Christ and the Virgin Mary are