From the Egyptians and other nations to whom the Grecians were indebted
for their earliest laws, they derived their established religion. To the
worship of the twelve principal divinities the gratitude of the
succeeding ages added the deification of heroes and legislators renowned
for their important services to society. Various degrees of adoration
were paid to the gods and to the souls of departed heroes. Temples were
erected, festivals were instituted, games were celebrated, and
sacrifices were offered with more or less pomp and magnificence to them
all. A regular gradation of immortal beings was acknowledged to preside
throughout universal nature from the Naiad, who was adored as the
tutelary guardian of a stream to Jupiter, the father of gods and men,
who ruled with Supreme power over heaven and earth.
The religion of the people extended little beyond the external honors
paid to the gods of their country and the attendance upon sacrifices and
processions. The sacred ceremonies were magnificent and public, except
that the votaries of Bacchus and Ceres were indulged in their secret
mysteries. The festivals were observed with every circumstance of pomp
and splendor to charm the eye and please the imagination. A sacrifice
was a feast attended with gayety and even licentiousness. Every temple
was the resort of the idle and the dissolute, and the shrines of the
Cyprian Venus and the Athenian Minerva could attest that devotion, far
from being a pure and exalted exercise of the mind, was only the
introduction to dissoluteness and debauchery.
The northern regions of Greece were particularly renowned for temples
from which oracles were issued. The temple of Apollo at Delphi, situated
upon a lofty rock near Parnassus, and that of Jupiter in the groves of
Dodona, were celebrated for the responses of the Pythia and the priests;
they were held in the greatest veneration for many ages, and their
oracles were consulted even in the most enlightened times by
philosophers themselves, who, in this instance, as well as many others,
conformed to the popular superstitions.
The spirit of the religion of ancient Greece was included in these
principles, that the worship of the gods was of superior obligation and
importance to all other duties, and that they frequently displayed their
power in this world in the punishment of the bad and the prosperity of
the virtuous. Such were the opinions inculcated by the most celebrated
philosophers and poets but the common people, more gratified by the
fictions of the received mythology, than by tenets of pure morals, found
in the actions recorded of their gods and goddesses a sufficient
justification of every species of licentiousness. With respect to a
future state of existence, the philosophers themselves appear to have
fluctuated in uncertainty, as may be collected from the sentiments of
Socrates. The poets inculcated a belief in Tartarus and Elysium. They
have drawn a picture of Tartarus in the most gloomy and horrific colors,
where men, who had been remarkable for impiety to the gods, such as
Tantalus, Tityus and Sisyphus, were tormented with a variety of misery
ingeniously adapted to their crimes.
The prospect of Elysium is beautiful and inviting, as described by
Homer, Hesiod and Pindar. In that delightful region there is no
inclement weather, but the soft zephyrs blow from the ocean to refresh
the inhabitants who live without care and anxiety; there the sky is
always serene and the sunshine is perpetual. The earth yields delicious
fruits for their sustenance three times per year. But these enjoyments
were confined to the persons who were of rank and distinction. Their
Elysium was a sensual heaven. How very different is the Christian's
future happy home?
Proteus informed Menelaus that he would be conveyed to the Islands of
the Blessed, because he was the husband of Helen, and the son-in-law of
Jupiter. No incentives to goodness from the consideration of a future
state are held out by the older poets to the female sex, or to the
ignoble or common people, however pure their conduct or exemplary their
virtue. In later times we find that Pindar extends his rewards to good
men in general; but Euripides is sometimes skeptical, and Iphigenia
without hesitation expresses her disbelief of the popular mythology.
The learned Jortin says, It gives us pleasure to trace in Homer the
important doctrine of a supreme God, a providence, and a free agency in
man, supposed to be consistent with fate or destiny; a difference
between moral good and evil, inferior gods or angels, some favorable to
men, others malevolent, and the immortality of the soul; but it gives us
pain to find these notions so miserably corrupted that they must have
had a very weak influence to excite men to virtue and deter them from
crime.--Jortin, Dissertation vi, p. 245.
This observation may be applied to the state of opinions even in the
most enlightened times of Greece, when the credulity and ignorance of
the common people, and the errors and doubts of the greatest
philosophers, proved the _necessity_ and the importance of the Christian
religion.
The possible attainments of a religious nature were very different from
ours. In the times of Lycurgus there were two hereditary kings or
presidents; their power was controlled by Lycurgus, through the gift of
equal authority to twenty-eight senators. The two kings commanded the
armies and high-priests of the temples. The senators were the executive
and legislative council of the state; with them the laws originated. The
assembly of the people elected the senators by saying yes or no to the
measures proposed to them, but had no right to discuss their
propriety--were not allowed the privilege.
Lycurgus allowed every family an equal amount of land; prohibited the
use of gold and silver, and made iron money the only currency of the
country, in order to check the avarice of the people. He forbade foreign
travel in order to retain the morals of his people, or keep them from
the corruptions of other nations. To produce a hardy people, he required
the women to indulge in all the athletic exercises of his government.
The children were inspected as soon as they were born, and those
considered worthy were handed over to the public nurses, and the
unworthy, that is, the deformed and sickly, were taken out and left in
the woods and upon the mountains to perish. All the children of the
Spartans were considered as the property of the state, and their
education consisted in accustoming them to endure the cravings of hunger
and thirst, with the scourge of discipline and every degree of
suffering. The business of Spartans consisted in preparing themselves
for war. They were disciplined in such a manner that it was necessary to
curb them constantly, lest they should rashly undertake to make
conquests. Out of this character of the Greeks arose that old saying,
"When Greek meets Greek then comes the tug of war."
Many of the laws of the Spartans would, in this country at least,
destroy all the finer feeling, and inaugurate a reign of despotism
utterly at variance with Christianity. God's time to give to the
inhabitants of the earth the glorious system of our holy religion was
not until our race was educated, so as to be no longer the slaves of the
reigning ambition and passion of such men as Lycurgus. The Savior's hour
was several centuries from Lycurgus. Here it is appropriate to remark
that God, in his providence with the nations of men, has during all the
ages given to men just as fast as they were able to receive.