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But in all sincerity one may ask which is the more blasphemous, nay, which is the more vulgar, the mind that pictures the Deity as a jealous tyrant who keeps the world as a separate establishment, or the thinker who seeks to banish the dream that veils the part from the whole, and who shows the soul of man and of the universe to be the same?

In the moral certainty which his believers possessed of the immediate realization of their hopes, it is not surprising that his faith should have been readily accorded. The enigma lies in the faith of the subsequent centuries.

At that time no semblance of revealed religion was affected: the people, however like all others before and since, would have gods, and gods they got; yet in displaying them to the infant race, Homer laughed at the divinities, and predicted that their reign would some day cease.