72 THE RELIGION. 



lished to the nation. When the public murmured in 

 delight around a picture of Xeuxis or a statue of 

 Praxiteles, when they thundered in applause to an ode by 

 Pindar or a lecture by Herodotus, how many hundreds of 

 young men must have gone home with burning brows 

 and throbbing hearts, devoured by the love of Fame. 

 And when we consider that though the geographical 

 Greece is a small country, the true Greece — that is to 

 say, the land inhabited by the Greeks — was in reality 

 a large country, — when we consider with what an im- 

 mense number of ideas they must have been brought 

 in contact on the shores of the Black Sea, in Asia 

 Minor, in Southern Italy, in Southern France, in Egypt, 

 and in Northern Africa, — when we consider that owing 

 to those noble contests of Oljnnpia, city was ever con- 

 tending against city, and within the city man against 

 man, — there is surely no longer anything mysterious in 

 the exceptional development of that people. 



Education in Greece was not a monopoly; it was 

 the precious privilege of all the free. The business of 

 religion was divided among three classes. The Priests 

 were merely the sacrificers and guardians of the sanctuary : 

 they were elected, like the mayors of our market towns, by 

 their fellow-citizens, for a limited time only, and without 

 their being withdrawn from the business of ordinary 

 life. The Poets revealed the nature, and portrayed 

 the character, and related the biography of the gods. 

 The Philosophers undertook the education of the young ; 

 and were also the teachers and preachers of morality. If 

 a man wished to obtain the favour of the gods, or to take 

 divine advice, he went to a priest : if he desired to turn 

 his mind to another, though scarcely a better world, he 

 took up his Homer or his Hesiod : and if he suffered from 

 sickness or mental affliction, he sent for a philosopher. 



