Historical Relations 91 



the faith that is in him. ReHgions on this level seek to justify 

 themselves and to explain their origin and nature in a manner that 

 shall conform with observed phenomena. There is thus a tendency 

 to develop ritual into a legal system, and attempts are consciously 

 made to fix tradition. It is a stage that clearly corresponds to the 

 present needs of the vast majority of civilised mankind, and is to 

 a large extent expressed to-day by the great religions. These all 

 have sought to provide their followers with an explanation of the 

 world in which they live. Such cosmologies were once the very 

 bases of the appeal that these religions made to the rationalising 

 mind. Historically we now know that on another mental level 

 such cosmologies form an obstacle where they were once an aid- 



4. Earlier Greek Thought 



It was, however, neither in Palestine, nor in Mesopotamia, 

 nor in the valley of the Nile that the scientific element was first 

 differentiated from the religious. That task was the work of the 

 Hellenes. 



When we examine the literary monuments of the classical 

 culture — of which we are the heirs and the Greeks the earlier and 

 main intellectual representatives — we cannot fail to be impressed 

 by the vastness of its interests, the enormous mental energy that 

 it displays and the bulk and completeness of its remains. Con- 

 sidering these things the comparative backwardness of the religious 

 development of that culture is a very striking feature. Greek 

 religion — using that word in the restricted sense — -never reached 

 the rational standard of the Hebrew religion. Thus no complete 

 and worked-out Greek cosmology, incorporated in a religious 

 atmosphere, has come down to us. The popular Greek religion, 

 in fact, never reached the coherent level of the Hebrew, or reached 

 it only in later times and then in competition with philosophical or 

 other systems which themselves made religious claims, and notably 

 in contact with Christianity. 



It has often been remarked that the Greeks had no Canon of 

 sacred literature. Yet even more noteworthy is it that in the 

 whole corpus of pagan classical literature — Greek and Latin — 

 there has survived no work by a priest. Imagine the corpus of 

 medieval and modern literature from which the clergy and almost 

 all ecclesiastical influence had been excluded ! 



The absence of a sacred Canon and the relatively low grade of 



