Ὅππως κεν ἐθέλησιν.[[1004]]

So, again, the two vases in the palace of Zeus, out of which he distributed good and evil to mankind.[[1005]] Hesiod also introduces Zeus, boasting that instead of fire he will give men a curse:—

Τοῖς δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἀντὶ πυρὸς δώσω κακόν

But in all ages men lay their misfortunes at the door of Providence. However, though the notions men entertain of God be ever so just, their conduct will not be thereby influenced, or a religion, properly speaking, created, unless several other truths be equally believed. It must be established not only that the maker of the universe still regards his workmanship, and will punish all those who seek to disorder the machine, by entailing remorse upon transgression, but that man is not a fugitive being, who can escape out of the hands of God by shrinking into annihilation, but a creature who, in accordance with his will, must run the vast circle of eternity, co-lasting with God himself.[[1006]] This is the great keystone of religion: without this, men will believe that even the Almighty can have no hold upon them; that they die, and their accountability ceases. The doctrine of immortality, however, has everywhere opened the skies to man, and set him upon the discovery of the steps leading thither, and, at the same time, has checked his daring, and poisoned his guilty pleasures.

From the remotest ages the immortality of the soul constituted a leading dogma in the religion of Greece, and was necessarily accompanied by the persuasion, that to the good that immortality would bring happiness, and to the evil the contrary.[[1007]] Homer is full of this, and the fables, wherein the enemies of God, parricides, murderers, the perpetrators of impiety and wrong, are, after death, banished to the depths of Tartarus, while various degrees of glory and happiness, not altogether unlike what is sublimely shadowed forth by St. Paul, are attributed to the good. That part, for example, of Heracles, which is divine, ascends to Heaven: Achilles enjoys the everlasting serenity of the Islands of the Blessed; and, generally, every virtuous man who rightly performed his duty ascended to the mansion prepared for him in the stars, there to live for ever in happiness.[[1008]] They taught, moreover, that the spirit of man is of heavenly birth: without this we had lived as so many animals. But God bestowed upon us an immortal soul, to watch as a guardian angel over the body, and placed it in the loftiest part of our frame, to teach us to look upward, and remember our birth,—that men are not creatures of clay but children of God and heirs of immortality.[[1009]]

It will not, however, surprise those who comprehend the constitution of human nature, to find that the Greeks, deprived as they were of revelation, were not content with the simple dogma of immortality, rendered happy or otherwise by rewards and punishments, but imagined a return of the soul to earth, and its passage through a long succession of bodies, until the stains,[[1010]] contracted during its first sojourn, had been obliterated: properly, therefore, their Hell was a kind of Purgatory, and, no doubt, suggested the original idea of that intermediate place to the Church of Rome. The religious part of the pagan world, those especially who went through the ceremonies of expiation and initiatory rites, firmly believed that bad men met in the realms of Hades with a just retribution for their crimes, and were again launched into the career of life, that they might receive from others that which they had done unto them.[[1011]] Though even in those days there were not wanting persons who affected to possess the power of absolution, nay, of granting for a moderate sum of money indulgences and licences to sin. These ragged impostors, of course, patronised only rich sinners, over whose heads vengeance might be hanging for crimes committed either by themselves or their ancestors, (since the Greeks also believed that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations,[[1012]]) professing to be masters of arts and incantations by which the gods were compelled to grant their prayers.

But while the vulgar and the superstitious were thus deluded, they who possessed superior education and superior minds, united, with a belief in the future, a more cheerful faith in the justice and beneficence of the Deity. They discovered, even by the light of reason, that human nature has been perverted from its original perfection,—that an evil principle has been introduced into our inmost essence,—that in our sinful state we are at enmity with God and all goodness,—and must by prayers and sacrifices be purified and reconciled to him ere we can taste of happiness. On the subject of prayer the wiser Greeks entertained notions not wholly unbecoming a Christian.[[1013]] They well enough understood, that it is not to be considered as an importuning of God for wealth or fame or wisdom, or, as ignorant persons suppose, an impious desire that He would for our sakes depart from his eternal purposes; but merely the nourishing in our minds of a profound veneration for the Almighty, a trust in his Providence and wisdom, an habitual disclosure voluntarily made of our inmost thoughts and desires, which must be known to him whether we will or not. Hence the great philosopher of antiquity[[1014]] simply prayed for those things which it might please God to send, and that if he asked for anything wrong it might be denied him.

It is no doubt true, as Mr. Mitford[[1015]] has observed, that the Gods in Homer are sometimes introduced favouring the perpetrators of injustice. But this is in contradiction to the general tone of the Greek religion; according to the tenets of which, every injured person had his Erinnyes who avenged whatever wrongs or violence he might suffer. Nay, even animals were comprised within the protecting circle of this beneficent superstition; and the God Pan was intrusted with the punishment of excesses perpetrated against them,[[1016]]

“When vultures that, with grief exceeding measure,

Lament their heart’s lost treasure,