GREECE 75 



GREECE 



Over the more modern or better-known religions of 

 Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, Judaism, and Moham- 

 medanism, you would hardly expect that I should 

 linger long. In each the same dominant note is found, 

 i.e., the duty of subordinating self to the general wel- 

 fare. As I have intimated before, this duty was often 

 circumscribed by the limited scope given to the idea of 

 what constituted the general. Thus, morality in Greek 

 religion seldom rose above the idea of patriotism, but 

 that they worshiped with unsurpassed fervor. Their 

 prophets were their poets. The works of Homer who 

 sang of war, of Hesiod the peasant-poet who sang of 

 home and peace, commerce and politics, of the lyric 

 poets, Callinus and Tyrtaeus, were their earliest Bible; 

 all of them poets who made a religion of patriotism. 

 In the works or utterances of many of the Greek phi- 

 losophers we do indeed catch sight of the higher truth. 

 Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, and possibly others, all 

 had the larger vision in smaller or greater measure; 

 and during the first Christian centuries, when Stoicism 

 predominated in Greek intellectual theories, "philos- 

 ophers of all schools, poets, historians, and rhetoricians, 

 spoke like Seneca and Epictetus of the sacred love of 

 the world, of the equality of man, of universal law and 

 a universal republic." * 



i Am. Cyc. vol. XI. p. 810. 



