Rightly understood, it is not so much a sign
of misunderstanding of the divine nature as of good understanding of
the human. The Greek lived, in all things, a healthy, and, in a
certain degree, a perfect life. He had no morbid or sickly feeling of
any kind. He was accustomed to face death without the slightest
shrinking, to undergo all kinds of bodily hardship without complaint,
and to do what he supposed right and honourable, in most cases, as a
matter of course. Confident of his own immortality, and of the power
of abstract justice, he expected to be dealt with in the next world as
was right, and left the matter much in his god's hands; but being thus
immortal, and finding in his own soul something which it seemed quite
as difficult to master, as to rule the elements, he did not feel that
it was an appalling superiority in those gods to have bodies of water,
or fire, instead of flesh, and to have various work to do among the
clouds and waves, out of his human way; or sometimes, even in a sort
of service to himself. Was not the nourishment of herbs and flowers a
kind of ministering to his wants; were not the gods in some sort his
husbandmen, and spirit-servants? Their mere strength or omnipresence
did not seem to him a distinction absolutely terrific. It might be the
nature of one being to be in two places at once, and of another to be
only in one; but that did not seem of itself to infer any absolute
lordliness of one nature above the other, any more than an insect must
be a nobler creature than a man, because it can see on four sides of
its head, and the man only in front.
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