NOTES 645 



is — man himself. 1 To me, Apollo was the personification of 

 humanity divine. 



There are two ways of thinking, the way of the god-man 

 and the way of the ape-man. As persons by their friends, so 

 shall we judge races by their gods. We know the fighting 

 glutton-gods of the Teutons, the monstrosities of India, the 

 hybrids of Egypt, the fetishes of the African, and the silly 

 saints of the Byzantines — idols of nature, war, lust, fear, or 

 decadent melancholy. But what other people than the ancient 

 Greeks have ever symbolised their own divinity in such forms 

 as those of Pallas, Apollo, the Muses, Prometheus ? Observe 

 that these are mind-gods — not brute-gods or nature-gods like 

 those of lower races. Moreover, they are divine, not only 

 through their attributes, but by their very health, vigour, 

 triumph, and beauty. Not mere symbols of the Thing-that-Is, 

 like Jehovah and Allah ; not figures of an unproductive medi- 

 tative fakirism, like Buddha ; not even like that higher vision 

 of Pity — higher yes, but one who still gazes ineffectually upon 

 a world of sorrow which he cannot cure and which ends by 

 crucifying him again, as in the present war : unlike these, the 

 great intellectual gods of ancient Greece taught us not only to 

 Be but to Do — to attain by our own efforts, wisdoms, and virtues. 

 The men who worshipped them were themselves gods — who 

 gave us the beginnings of our civilisation of to-day. Theirs 

 was, I say, the only true religion — that in which man is his own 

 deity. It is the religion of every poet, every man of science, 

 every artist, every discoverer, every inventor, every good and 

 wise person ; for the wreaths and the offerings which these 

 men place before their god are the flowers and the fruits of 

 their own lives — dedicated to Man. With the addition of 

 the Sermon on the Mount, this should be the creed of all of us 

 to-day. 



Suddenly that age ceased. But why? The climate, the 

 mountains, the valleys, the rocks, the springs of Greece re- 

 mained ; the same fields and the same trade-routes could have 

 fed the same populations ; the same ideals could have kept them 

 great. Was it the irruption of barbarians, was it the change 

 of economical conditions, was it the entry of some new endemic 

 pestilence, was it political servitude that debased them ? The 

 two first could scarcely have destroyed them had they not 

 1 See the Poetry Review, March-April 1918. 



