consists of Asiatic races driven out as wanderers from their own homes,
and gradually settling down in Europe; on their wanderings these races
lost the original religion of their homes, and with it the right view of
life: so, under a new sky, they formed religions for themselves, which
were rather crude; the worship of Odin, for instance, the Druidic or the
Greek religion, the metaphysical content of which was little and
shallow. In the meantime the Greeks developed a special, one might
almost say, an instinctive sense of beauty, belonging to them alone of
all the nations who have ever existed on the earth, peculiar, fine and
exact: so that their mythology took, in the mouth of their poets, and in
the hands of their artists, an exceedingly beautiful and pleasing shape.
On the other hand, the true and deep significance of life was lost to
the Greeks and Romans. They lived on like grown-up children, till
Christianity came and recalled them to the serious side of existence.

_Philalethes_. And to see the effects one need only compare antiquity
with the Middle Age; the time of Pericles, say, with the fourteenth
century. You could scarcely believe you were dealing with the same kind
of beings. There, the finest development of humanity, excellent
institutions, wise laws, shrewdly apportioned offices, rationally
ordered freedom, all the arts, including poetry and philosophy, at their
best; the production of works which, after thousands of years, are
unparalleled, the creations, as it were, of a higher order of beings,
which we can never imitate; life embellished by the noblest fellowship,
as portrayed in Xenophen's _Banquet_. Look on the other picture, if you
can; a time at which the Church had enslaved the minds, and violence the
bodies of men, that knights and priests might lay the whole weight of
life upon the common beast of burden, the third estate. There, you have
might as right, Feudalism and Fanaticism in close alliance, and in their
train abominable ignorance and darkness of mind, a corresponding