answering. Like the saints, they belong to all times, from the most
remote to the most recent. The mythical Philopregmon, a shadowy being
dating back to times of primitive worship, gives luck from his
monument on the roadside by the gate of Potidaea.[11] But the
traveller who had prayed to him in the morning as he left the town
might pay the same duty next evening by the tomb of Brasidas in the
market-place of Amphipolis.[12]

But alongside of the traditional worship of these multitudinous and
multiform deities, a grave and deep religious sense laid stress on the
single quality of goodness as being essentially akin to divinity, and
spoke with aversion of complicated ritual and extravagant sacrifice. A
little water purifies the good man; the whole ocean is not sufficient
to wash away the guilt of the sinner.[13] "Holiness is a pure mind,"
said the inscription over the doorway of a great Greek temple.[14] The
sanctions of religion were not indeed independent of rewards and
punishments, in this or in a future state. But the highest Greek
teachings never laid great stress on these; and even where they are
adduced as a motive for good living, they are always made secondary to
the excellence of piety here and in itself. Through the whole course
of Greek thought the belief in a future state runs in an undercurrent.
A striking fragment of Sophocles[15] speaks of the initiated alone as
being happy, since their state after death is secure. Plato, while he
reprobates the teaching which would make men good in view of the other
world, and insists on the natural excellence of goodness for its own
sake, himself falls back on the life after death, as affected for good
or evil by our acts here, in the visions, "no fairy-tales,"[16] which
seem to collect and reinforce the arguments of the /Phaedo/ and the
/Republic/. But the ordinary thought and practice ignored what might
happen after death. Life was what concerned men and absorbed them; it