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swept away primitive national
idealisms without supplying any new ones. The Roman ploughman
must have missed the fauns whom he had been accustomed to expect in
the thicket at the end of his furrow, when the new faith told him that
these were nothing but rustling leaves. When the swish of unseen
garments beside the old nymph-haunted fountain was silenced, his
heart was left lonely and his imagination impoverished. Much charm
and romance vanished from his early world with the passing of its
pagan creatures, and indeed it is to this cause that we must trace the
extraordinarily far-reaching and varied crop of miraculous legends of
all sorts which sprang up in early Catholic times. These were the
protest of unconscious idealism against the bare world from which its
sweet presences had vanished.
"In th' olde dayes of the King Arthour, Of which that Britons speken
greet honour, Al was this land fulfild of fayerye. The elf-queen, with
hir joly companye, Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede; This was
the olde opinion, as I rede. But now can no man see none elves mo. For
now the grete charitee and prayeres Of limitours and othere holy freres,
* * * * *
This maketh that there been no fayeryes. For ther as wont to walken
was an elf, Ther walketh now the limitour himself."

Against this impoverishment the human revolt was inevitable, and it
explains the spirit in such writers as Shelley and Goethe. Children of
nature, who love the sun and the grass, and are at home upon the earth,
their spirits cry for something to delight and satisfy them, nearer than
speculations of theology or cold pictures of heaven. Wordsworth, in his
famous lines, has expressed the protest in the familiar words:--
"Great God, I'd rather be A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn; So
might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make
me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old
Triton blow his wreathèd horn."
The early classic thought which found its most perfect expression in the
mythology of Greece was not originally or essentially pagan. It was
humanistic, and represented the response of man's spirit to that free and
beautiful spirit which he found in nature around him. All such
symbolism of Greek religion as that of the worship of Dionysus and
Ceres, shows this. In these cults the commonest things of life, the wine
and corn wherewith man sustained himself, assumed a higher and
richer meaning. Food and drink were not mere sensual gratifications,
but divine gifts, as they are in the twenty-third Psalm; and the whole
material world was a symbol and sacrament of spiritual realities and
blessings. Similarly the ritual of Eleusis interpreted man's common life
into a wonderful world of mystic spirituality. Thus there was a great
fund of spiritual insight of the finest and most beautiful sort in the very
heart of that life which has thoughtlessly been adopted as the type of
paganism.
Yet the history of Greece affords the explanation and even the
justification of the popular idea. The pagan who is in us all, tends ever
to draw us downwards from sacramental and symbolic ways of
thinking to the easier life of the body and the earth. On the one hand,
for blood that is young and hot, the life of sense is overwhelming. On
the other hand, for the weary toiler whose mind is untrained, the
impression of the world is that of heavy clay. Each in his own way
finds idealism difficult to retain. The spirituality of nature floats like a
dream before the mind of poets, and is seen now and then in wistful

glimpses by every one; but it needs some clearer and less elusive form,
as well as some definite association with conscience, if it is to be
defended against the pull of the green earth. It has been well said that,
for the Greek, God was the view; but when the traveller goes forward
into the view, he meets with many things which it is dangerous to
identify with God. For the young spirit of the early times the temptation
to earthliness was overwhelming. The world was fair, its gates were
open, and its barriers all down. Men took from literature and from
religion just as much of spirituality as they understood and as little as
they desired, and the effect was swift and inevitable in that
degeneration which reached its final form in the degraded sensuality of
the later Roman Empire.
The confusing element in all such inquiry lies in the fact that one can
never get an unmixed paganism nor a perfect idealism. Just as the
claims of body and spirit are in our daily life inextricably interwoven,
so the