Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 | Page 4

join their lost ones,
who could not come back to them, in the grave. Vainly she sought to
descend into the dark underworld to see her "young Persephone,
transcendent queen of shades." Not for her weary, wandering feet was a
single one of the thousand paths that lead downward to death. Her only
consolation was in the vernal flowers, which, springing from the dark
earthly mould, seemed to her to be
"heralds from the dreary deep, Soft voices from the solemn streams,"
by whose shores, veiled in eternal twilight, wandered her sad child, the
queen of the realm of Dis, with its nine-fold river, gates of adamant,
and minarets of fire. The heartlessness of all the ethnic deities, of
whatever age or nation, is a noticeable feature, especially when
contrasted with the unfathomable pity of their Exterminator, who wept
over the chief city of his fatherland, and would have gathered it, as a
hen gathereth her chickens, under the wings of his love, though its sons
were seeking to compass his destruction. Those old ethnic deities were
cruel, inexorable, and relentless. They knew nothing of mercy and
forgiveness. They ministered no balm to human sorrow. The daemons
who wandered in human shape over the classic lands of old were all
fickle and malevolent. They oftentimes impelled their victims to
suicide. The ghouls that haunt the tombs and waste places of the
regions where they were once worshipped are their lineal descendants
and modern representatives. The vampires and pest-hags of the Levant
are their successors in malignity. The fair humanities of the old religion
were fair only in shape and exterior. The old pagan gods were friendly

only to kings, heroes, and grandees; they had no beatitude for the poor
and lowly. Human despair, under their dispensation, knew no
alleviation but a plunge from light and life into the underworld, --rather
than be monarch of which, the shade of Achilles avers, in the
"Odusseia," that it would prefer to be the hireling and drudge of some
poor earthly peasant. Elysium was only for a privileged few.
It has been said that the old ethnic creeds were the true religion
"growing wild,"--that the human soil was prepared by such kind of
spiritual crops and outgrowths, with their tares and weeds intermingled
with wheat, for the seed that was finally to be sown by the Divine
Sower,--that, erroneous as they were in a thousand respects, they were
genuine emanations of the religious nature in man, and as such not to
be stigmatized or harshly characterized,--that without them the human
soil could not have been made ready for the crop of unmixed truth. This
may be true of some of them, though surely not of the popular form of
the old Greek ethnic faith. Its deities were nothing better than the
passions of human nature projected upon ethereal heights, and
incarnated and made personal in undecaying demonic shapes,--not
conditioned and straitened like the bodies of man, but enjoying
perpetual youth and immunity from death in most cases, with
permission to take liberties with Space and Time greater even than are
granted to us by steam and telegraph-wires.
The vulgar Grecian polytheism was all material. It had no martyrs and
confessors. It was not worth dying for, as it was good for nothing to
live by. The religion of Hellas was the religion of sensualistic beauty
simply. It was just the worship for Pheidias and Praxiteles, for the bard
of Teos and the soft Catullus, for sensual poet, painter, and sculptor.
But "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," although we gather most
of our knowledge of Olympus and the Olympians from his verse, was
worthy of a loftier and purer heaven than the low one under which he
wandered from city to city, singing the tale of Troy divine, and hymns
and paeans to the gods. The good and the true were mere metaphysical
abstractions to the old Greek. What must he have been when it would
not have been safe for him to leave his wife alone with the best and
highest of his gods? The ancient Hellenes were morally most vicious
and depraved, even when compared with contemporary heathen nations.
The old Greek was large in brain, but not in heart. He had created his

gods in his own image, and they were--what they were. There was no
goodness in his religion, and we can tolerate it only as it is developed
in the Homeric rhapsodies, in the far-off fable-time of the old world,
and amongst men who were but partially self-conscious. In that remote
Homeric epoch it is tolerable, when cattle-stealing and war were the
chief employments of the ruling caste,--and we may add,
woman-stealing, into the bargain. "I did not come to fight against the
Trojans," says Achilles, "because I had