The
second stage in the development of Greek religion had come; a [240]
period in which poet and artist were busily engaged in the work of
incorporating all that might be retained of the vague divinations of
that earlier visionary time, in definite and intelligible human image
and human story. The vague belief, the mysterious custom and
tradition, develope themselves into an elaborately ordered ritual--
into personal gods, imaged in ivory and gold, sitting on beautiful
thrones. Always, wherever a shrine or temple, great or small, is
mentioned, there, we may conclude, was a visible idol, there was
conceived to be the actual dwelling-place of a god. And this
understanding became not less but more definite, as the temple became
larger and more splendid, full of ceremony and servants, like the
abode of an earthly king, and as the sacred presence itself assumed,
little by little, the last beauties and refinements of the visible
human form and expression.
In what we have seen of this first period of Greek art, in all its
curious essays and inventions, we may observe this demand for
beautiful idols increasing in Greece--for sacred images, at first
still rude, and in some degree the holier for their rudeness, but
which yet constitute the beginnings of the religious style,
consummate in the work of Pheidias, uniting the veritable image of
man in the full possession of his reasonable soul, with the true
religious mysticity, the signature there of something from afar.
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