al, and efficacious.

[Sidenote: It fosters spiritual life by conceiving it in its
perfection.]

A sense for human limitations, however, has its foil in the ideal of
deity, which is nothing but the ideal of man freed from those
limitations which a humble and wise man accepts for himself, but which a
spiritual man never ceases to feel as limitations. Man, for instance, is
mortal, and his whole animal and social economy is built on that fact,
so that his practical ideal must start on that basis, and make the best
of it; but immortality is essentially better, and the eternal is in many
ways constantly present to a noble mind; the gods therefore are
immortal, and to speak their language in prayer is to learn to see all
things as they do and as reason must, under the form of eternity. The
gods are furthermore no respecters of persons; they are just, for it is
man's ideal to be so. Prayer, since it addresses deity, will in the end
blush to be selfish and partial; the majesty of the divine mind
envisaged and consulted will tend to pass into the human mind.

This use of prayer has not been conspicuous in Christian times, because,
instead of assimilating the temporal to the eternal, men have
assimilated the eternal to the temporal, being perturbed fanatics in
religion rather than poets and idealists. Pagan devotion, on the other
hand, was full of this calmer spirit. The gods, being frankly natural,
could be truly ideal. They embodied what was fairest in life and loved
men who resembled them, so that it was delightful and ennobling to see
their images everywhere, and to keep their names and story perpetually
in mind. They did not by their influence alienate man from his
appropriate happiness, but they perfected it by their presence. Peopling
all places, changing their forms as all living things must according to
place and circumstance, they showed how all kinds of being, if perfect
in their kind, might be perfectly good. They asked for a reverence
consistent with reason, and exercised prerogatives that let man free.
Their worship was a perpetual lesson in humanity, moderation, and
beauty. Something pre-rational and monstrous often peeped out behind
their serenity, as it does beneath the human soul, and there was
certainly no lack of wildness and mystic horror in their apparitions.
The ideal must needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all,
it rests; but reason exists to exorcise their madness and win them over
to a