us to conceive the power, over a Greek, of the name of Apollo. But if,
fir us also, as for the Greek, the sunrise means daily restoration to the
sense of passionate gladness and of perfect life--if it means the
thrilling of new strength through every nerve,--the shedding over us of a
better peace than the peace of night, in the power of the dawn,--and the
purging of evil vision and fear by the baptism of its dew;--if the sun
itself is an influence, to us also, of spiritual good--and becomes thus
in reality, not in imagination, to us also, a spiritual power,--we may
then soon over-pass the narrow limit of conception which kept that power
impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the thought of an angel who
rejoiced as a strong man to run his course, whose voice calling to life
and to labor rang round the earth, and whose going forth was to the ends
of heaven.

9. The time, then, at which I shall take up for you, as well as I can
decipher it, the traditions of the gods of Greece, shall be near the
beginning of its central and formed faith,--about 500 B.C.,--a faith of
which the character is perfectly represented by Pindar and Æschylus, who
are both of them outspokenly religious, and entirely sincere men; while
we may always look back to find the less developed thought of the
preceding epoch given by Homer, in a more occult, subtle,
half-instinctive, and involuntary way.

10. Now, at that culminating period of the Greek religion, we find,
under one governing Lord of all things, four subordinate elemental
forces, and four spiritual powers living in them and commanding them.
The elements are of course the well-known four of the ancient world,--
the earth, the waters, the fire, and the air; and the living powers of
them are Demeter, the Latin Ceres; Poseidon, the Latin Neptune; Apollo,
who has retained always his Greek name; and Athena, the Latin Minerva.