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.
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