Excerpt from Greek and Roman Mythology Heroic Legend
Study of Greek religion needs no apology, and should need no bush. This all must feel who have looked upon the creations of the art it inspired. But to purify and strengthen admiration by the higher light of knowledge is no work of ease.
No truth is more vital than the seeming paradox which declares that Greek myths are not nature-myths. The ape is not further removed from the man than is the nature-myth from the religious fancy of the Greeks as we meet them in history. The Greek myth is the child of the devout and lovely imagination of the noble race that dwelt around the Aegaean. Coarse fantasies of brutish forefathers in their Northern homes softened beneath the southern sun into a pure and godly beauty, and thus gave birth to the divine forms of Hellenic religion.
Comparative Mythology can teach us much. It can shew how gods are born in the mind of the savage and moulded into his image. But it cannot reveal to us the heart of the Greek as his devout thoughts turned towards his gods. Greece sees God with her own eyes; and if we would share the loveliness of her vision we must put away from our thoughts the uncouth forms which had been worn by her northern forefathers' deities, the slough cast off by her gods as they grew into shapes of godliness and beauty. True it is that in regions where nature and history hindered Greek religion from developing its potential riches, that slough was still often trailed by the figures of popular faith; but these exceptions point all the more effectively the lesson of evolution in Greek religion.
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