Margaret added that it was a vulgar notion that the Poets of Greece created her Gods; that the Poets were objective, and could give only humanized representations of them.
Henry Hedge thought that there was a point to which philosophy aided and prompted the creative power, but, that point passed, rather checked its action. Analysis took the place of the objective tendency.
Well! said William White, would not the human mind, aided only by culture, be incapable of any better idea than Frank Shaw suggested? Must not revelation complete the work?
Margaret said that the answer to his question would be determined by his understanding of the word “revelation.” She could not believe in a God who had ever left himself without a witness in the world. As soon as the human mind and will were ready, there was always some great Truth waiting to be submitted to their united action, until it was worn out. The beautiful Greek era had been succeeded by a period of inaction; the Roman era by another, and so on. She was sorry we had wandered from our subject so far as to doubt her very premises!
Frank said, everything rested on those premises; so he thought that the ideals of beauty, love, justice, and truth should be referred to the Infinite Mind, and not to the Greek.
I wonder where he was when Margaret told about the Love which “was” before Order!
Henry Hedge said that Culture was the Mediator between the Finite and the Infinite.
James Freeman Clarke, alluding to Mr. Hedge’s previous remark upon the growth of philosophy, and the loss of the creative power, said that if that were a fact, it greatly diminished the probability of the birth of pure Genius into the world. Plato wrote when philosophy was at the turning point.
Margaret said that there were many proofs in Plato that the philosophers understood the personifications of the mythi. She thought that the gods, the demigods, and the heroes of mythology represented distinct classes, and that this was not sufficiently remembered. She referred to the story of the burning of Hercules in Ovid, where Jupiter calls Juno to see how well his son endures!
William White said that he thought the idea of Deity was degraded when the Greeks changed a hero into a god; but if Culture be a Mediator, would not Plato have been greater had he been born into the nineteenth century?