Homer and the popular faith saw and worshipped the weaknesses and vices of the Grecian character,
as well as its virtues, in magnified forms. The gods are born, but never die. They have bodies and
senses, like mortals, only in colossal proportions. They eat and drink, though only nectar and
ambrosia. They are awake and fall asleep. They travel, but with the swiftness of thought. They
mingle in battle. They cohabit with human beings, producing heroes or demigods. They are limited
to time and space. Though sometimes honored with the attributes of omnipotence and omniscience,
and called holy and just, yet they are subject to an iron fate (Moira), fall under delusion, and reproach
each other with folly and crime. Their heavenly happiness is disturbed by all the troubles of earthly
life. Even Zeus or Jupiter, the patriarch of the Olympian family, is cheated by his sister and wife
Hera (Juno), with whom he had lived three hundred years in secret marriage before he proclaimed
her his consort and queen of the gods, and is kept in ignorance of the events before Troy. He
threatens his fellows with blows and death, and makes Olympus tremble when he shakes his locks
in anger. The gentle Aphrodite or Venus bleeds from a spear-wound on her finger. Mars is felled
with a stone by Diomedes. Neptune and Apollo have to serve for hire and are cheated. Hephaestus
limps and provokes an uproarious laughter. The gods are involved by their marriages in perpetual
jealousies and quarrels. They are full of envy and wrath, hatred and lust prompt men to crime, and
provoke each other to lying, and cruelty, perjury and adultery. The Iliad and Odyssey, the most
popular poems of the Hellenic genius, are a chronique scandaleuse of the gods. Hence Plato banished
them from his ideal Republic. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles also rose to loftier ideas of the
gods and breathed a purer moral atmosphere; but they represented the exceptional creed of a few,
while Homer expressed the popular belief. Truly we have no cause to long with Schiller for the
return of the "gods of Greece," but would rather join the poet in his joyful thanksgiving:
"Einen zu bereichern unter allen,
Musste diese Götterwelt vergehen."
Notwithstanding this essential apostasy from truth and holiness, heathenism was religion,
a groping after "the unknown God." By its superstition it betrayed the need of faith. Its polytheism
rested on a dim monotheistic background; it subjected all the gods to Jupiter, and Jupiter himself
to a mysterious fate. It had at bottom the feeling of dependence on higher powers and reverence
for divine things. It preserved the memory of a golden age and of a fall. It had the voice of
conscience, and a sense, obscure though it was, of guilt. It felt the need of reconciliation with deity,
and sought that reconciliation by prayer, penance, and sacrifice. Many of its religious traditions
and usages were faint echoes of the primal religion; and its mythological dreams of the mingling
of the gods with men, of demigods, of Prometheus delivered by Hercules from his helpless sufferings,
were unconscious prophecies and fleshly anticipations of Christian truths.
This alone explains the great readiness with which heathens embraced the gospel, to the
shame of the Jews.^65
There was a spiritual Israel scattered throughout the heathen world, that never received the
circumcision of the flesh, but the unseen circumcision of the heart by the hand of that Spirit which
bloweth where it listeth, and is not bound to any human laws and to ordinary means. The Old
Testament furnishes several examples of true piety outside of the visible communion with the
Jewish church, in the persons of Melchisedec, the friend of Abraham, the royal priest, the type of(^65) Comp. Matt. 8:10; 15:28. Luke 7:9. Acts 10:35.
A.D. 1-100.