light of the ideal, the whole business and complexity of the material
side of life; to him it was the vividly present and active soul of his
corporate existence, representing in the symbolic forms of ritual the
actual facts of his experience. What he re-enacted periodically, in
ordered ceremony, was but the drama of his daily life; so that, as we
said before, the state in one of its aspects was a church, and every
layman from one point of view a priest.

The question, "What did a belief in the gods really mean to the Greek"
has now received at least some sort of answer. It meant, to recur to our
old phrase, that he was made at home in the world. In place of the
unintelligible powers of nature, he was surrounded by a company of
beings like himself; and these beings who controlled the physical world
were also the creators of human society. From them were descended the
Heroes who founded families and states; and under their guidance and
protection cities prospered and throve. Their histories were recounted
in innumerable myths, and these again were embodied in ritual. The whole
life of man, in its relations both to nature and to society, was
conceived as derived from and dependent upon his gods; and this
dependence was expressed and brought vividly home to him in a series of
religious festivals. Belief in the gods was not to him so much an
intellectual conviction, as a spiritual atmosphere in which he moved;
and to think it away would be to think away the whole structure of Greek
civilisation.


Section 6. The Greek Conception of the Relation of Man to the Gods.

Admitting, however, that all this is true, admitting the place of
religion in Greek life, do we not end, after all, in a greater puzzle