" No one who has realised
the power and glory of the Eastern sun, can wonder at the identification
both of the good and bad symbolism with the orb of day. Sun-worship is
indeed a form of nature-worship, and there are physical reasons obvious
enough for its being able to incorporate both the clean and unclean,
both the deadly and the benign legends. Yet there is a splendour in it
which is seen in its attraction for such minds as those of Aurelian and
Julian, and which is capable of refinement in the delicate spirituality
of Mithra, that worship of the essential principle of light, the soul of
sunshine. In the worship of Apollo we have a combination, than which
none on record is more striking, of the finest spirituality with the
crudest paganism.
Here then, in the magical arena of the early world of Greece, we see in
one of its most romantic forms the age-long strife between paganism and
spirituality. We have taken at random four of the most popular stories
of Greece. We have found in each of them pagan elements partly
bequeathed by that earlier and lower earth-bound worship which preceded
the Olympians, partly added in decadent days when the mind of man was
turned from the heights and grovelling again.
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