Formal religion always demanded by the Greeks.
While admitting unreservedly the vast progress we have attained by having the Christian religion an integral part of all reasonable education, we must urge on the other side that to most people, and at all times, religion is only a very occasional guide of action, and that what we have attained with all our preaching and teaching is rather an acquiescence in its excellence than a practical submission to its directions. So far as this mere acquiescence in moral sanctions is to be considered, all Greek legislators took care to inculcate the teaching and the observance of a State religion, with moral sanctions, and with rewards and punishments. They knew as well as we do that a public without a creed is a public without a conscience, and that scepticism, however consistent with individual sobriety and goodness, has never yet been found to serve as a general substitute for positive beliefs.
Real religion the property of exceptional persons.
But when we come to the case of superior individuals, to whom religion is a living and acting force, then we have on the Greek side those splendid thinkers, whose lives were as pure a model as their speculations were a lesson, to the world. These men certainly did not require a higher faith to make them good citizens, and were a 'law unto themselves, showing forth the work of law written in their hearts,' with a good conscience. The analogy, then, between the old Greek States and
ours as regards education may be closer than is usually assumed by those who have before them the contrast of religions.
Greek views on music
I will mention a very different point on which all the ancient educators were agreed, and which seems quite strange to modern notions,—I mean the capital importance of music, on account of its direct effect upon morals. They all knew that the Spartan pipes had much the same effect as the Highland pipes have now upon the soldiers who feel them to be their national expression. Hence all music might be regarded as either wholesome or unwholesome stimulant, wholesome or unwholesome soothing, to the moral nature; and not only does the sober Aristotle discuss with great seriousness and in great detail the question of this influence, but he agrees with Plato in regarding the State as bound to interfere and prevent those strains, 'softly sweet in Lydian measure,' which delighted, indeed, and beguiled the sense, but disturbed and endangered the morals of men.
discussed in my Rambles and Studies in Greece.
On this fascinating but difficult subject I have already said my say in the last chapter of my Social Life in Greece[126:1], and I will only repeat that if the Greeks put too much stress on this side of education as affecting character, the moderns have certainly erred in the opposite directions, and are quite wrong in regarding music as an accomplishment purely æsthetic, as having nothing to say to the
practical side of our nature,—our sensual passions and our moral principles.
