the Greek state to the idea that the state recognised no religion; on
the contrary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound up with
its whole structure, in general and in detail, that the very conception
of a separation between the powers was impossible. If there was no
separate church, in our sense of the term, as an independent organism
within the state, it was because the state, in one of its aspects, was
itself a church, and derived its sanction, both as a whole and in its
parts, from the same gods who controlled the physical world. Not only
the community as a whole but all its separate minor organs were under
the protection of patron deities. The family centred in the hearth,
where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered sacrifice and
prayer to the ancestors of the house; the various corporations into
which families were grouped, the local divisions for the purpose of
taxation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual unity from the
worship of a common god; and finally the all-embracing totality of the
state itself was explained and justified to all its members by the cult
of the special protecting deity to whom its origin and prosperous
continuance were due. The sailor who saw, on turning the point of
Sunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the Acropolis,
beheld in a type the spiritual form of the state; Athene and Athens were
but two aspects of the same thing; and the statue of the goddess of
wisdom dominating the city of the arts may serve to sum up for us the
ideal of that marvellous corporate life where there was no
ecclesiastical religion only because there was no secular state.

Regarded from this point of view, we may say that the religion of the
Greeks was the spiritual side of their political life. And we must add
that in one respect their religion pointed the way to a higher political
achievement than they were ever able to realise in fact. One fatal
defect of the Greek civilisation, as is familiar to students of their