Thus far we have considered paganism in its bearing and influence upon modern Greek Christianity. We have seen how the Church, in endeavouring to widen her influence, countenanced many practices and conciliated many prejudices of a people whose temperament needed a multitude of gods and whose piety could pay homage to them all, a people moreover to whom the criterion of divinity was neither moral perfection nor omnipotence. From the ethical standpoint some of the ancient gods were better, some worse than men: in point of power they were superhuman but not almighty. Some indeed claimed that there was no difference in origin between mankind and its deities. ‘One is the race of men’ sang Pindar ‘with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath of life: yet sundered are they by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[107].’ One in origin, they are diverse in might. The test of godhead is power sufficing to defy death. Rightly therefore did Homer make ‘deathless’ and ‘everbeing’ his constant epithets for the gods. Immortality alone is the quality which distinguishes them in kind and not merely in degree from men, and makes them worthy of worship. A people wedded to such conceptions were naturally ready enough to install new immortals of whom they had not known before, but reluctant to depose in their favour those whom they and their forefathers had known and served. Dangers were to be apprehended from neglect; blessings were to be secured by tendance. Greater honour might be paid to one god, less to another; but from no immortal should service be wholly withheld: even unconscious oversights should be remedied by offerings ‘to an unknown god.’ Such in its essence was the popular religion, inconsistent it may be and not deeply intellectual, but in sympathies very broad--broad enough to encompass the worship of all immortals, broad as the earth and the sky and the sea wherein they dwelt and moved.
So vital and so deep-seated in the hearts of the common-folk are these religious tendencies, that even at the present day when the word ‘Christian’ has become a popular synonym for ‘Greek’ in contradistinction not only with ‘Mohammedan,’ but even sometimes with ‘Western’ or ‘Catholic’ or with ‘Protestant,’ and when horror would be excited by any imputation of polytheism, there are yet recognised a large number of superhuman and for the most part immortal beings, whom the Church has been able neither to eradicate from the popular mind nor yet to incorporate under the form of saints or devils in her own theological system. These beings, whether benignant to man or maleficent, are all treated as divine. In ancient times the common people had probably little appreciation of the various grades of divinity; indeed it was one of the seven sages, we are told, who first differentiated God and the lesser deities and the heroes[108]; and at the present day the common-folk are certainly no more subtle of understanding than they were then. God and the Saints and these pagan powers are all feared and worshipped in the several ways traditionally suited to each; but the fact of worship proclaims them all alike to be gods.