§ 2

A new star, the story of the birth of Christ tells, guided the kings to the manger, where lay a girl-mother and her newborn child. She, one “of the people,” her reverent custodian a carpenter. That was what they went to see, and the new star was their guide. We need not take that literally; it is far more beautiful symbolically, figuratively, poetically: a new light was dawning upon a worn out faith, a new symbol of the Spirit of God arose, and not out of a palace or as a child of kings, but from a manger, from a straw bed, from a girl of the people and a craftsman. Not only did the three kings come thither guided by light in their hearts, but simple mountain shepherds too from their sheepfolds came. An angel of the heavenly host, three Oriental kings, a few shepherds, a maid, a carpenter, and a little child were the first actors in a great drama that has moved the world for two thousand years.

A shepherd, a flock of goats, a bubbling fountain form the dramatis personæ of the myth of Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. From that sprang the Pithea and the thousands of votive statues for which Delphi became famous. Its temples and universities, its priests and politicians degraded the myth to a level of lies and deceit. “God set a bow in the sky for a sign.” How does it affect the promise that we know how the bow came there? We remember the promise in the poem. We are not concerned with the structure of the bow. Even now in these materialist days wherever we see the rainbow we recall God’s promise which, made or not made to mankind in fact, is so told in the poem.

Plato’s allegory in the “Phædrus” of the chariot of the soul, the antagonistic steeds Love and Desire, Eros and Himeros, struggling for supremacy, taken literally or judged from a scientific aspect, is nonsense; as a parable it is one of the truest, as a poem one of the most beautiful in Greek literature.

Apollo came over the mountains. The singer, minstrel, and healer came, bringing music from Olympus. We picture the Sun God lighting up the dense forests as he journeyed through them on the crests and edge of a mountain range. We can hear in our spiritual ears sweet music from his golden lyre, see the rivers as the Sun God passes over them, sparkling with amethyst diamond and silver as the light from him, the giver of light, kisses their surface. This is the figure of the Dorian invasion that the poets, not the scientists, present!

We still think of Apollo as the primitive author and forerunner of all that Greece became. When the Persians were on their way to invade Greece, Datis, the admiral of the great fleet, steered clear of the island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, for fear of vengeance from the God of Light, whom they worshipped. Even to-day Delos is a sacred island where once a year Christian Mass is said by Roman and Greek priests upon an ancient altar to Apollo that I myself have seen. The myth of Apollo is still alive in poetry if it is dead in prose! The imagination still responds to it if reason does not accept it as a literal truth.

It surely was not the reverberation of the trumpets’ blasts from the hosts of Joshua which overthrew the walls of Jericho. Taken literally it is a ridiculous statement; figuratively, a very impressive one. The power of martial music is great; it stimulates courage, quickens the pulse, and inspires mad valour, which it urges until every obstacle in the way of a triumphant army is overthrown: an impressive metaphor so taken, but taken as a literal fact it is silly.

The power of music as an influence to calm a people maddened by lust of war is told by the poet. It is related by a Greek historian that one hundred harpists were sent to Sparta from Ionia to make gentle, seductive, sedative music to a wild people who knew it not, knowing only war. It prevailed! Their war instincts slept under the calming influence of Apollo’s art.

Strictly speaking, the event related may never have happened. As a poetical presentation of the power of music it is true! Was not the madness of Saul temporarily abated by the harpist David? The foregoing illustrations illustrate the range of art as a direct influence upon men in diametrically opposite directions.

That the Divine Spirit is very near, is even in our midst, is related in Genesis. “God walked in the garden in the cool of the day,” so sang the poet. The idea of God as subject to heat or cold is almost comical. The poet has anthropomorphised a mystery. To God he gives the feelings of the thing he has created, that is the way he presents God—God as very near to man and sharing his comforts and discomforts. The primitive poet made nonsense poetic sense.

The nearness of the spiritual world has been well said by a spiritual poet, “Heaven is only a foot above our heads.” How near, after all, is the Ideal to the Real, if we could only see; and yet we can feel it in our subconscious state to be so.

Now let us see for a moment how closely in touch Divinity is with agricultural life, how much it was in favour of it, how the gods were close to it, becoming even a part of it, not only by the benediction of it, but unison with it. Obviously, the gods thought well of labour and the labourer both loved and feared the gods.

As, to the Hebrew poet, God walked in the garden in the cool of the day, so to the Greek, “Speak low in the noontide, for then the gods sleep.” The mythical instances presented are only a few of many which occur in classical mythology. And be it remembered that we inherit Greek mythology. It is far nearer than we are apt to think to what are still primitive instincts, and specially so to those who till and sow the land, follow the plough, who guard our flocks, and being an out-of-door-living people are (may be mysteriously) in touch with mother Nature and the gods who watch over her.

Æneas, the father of the Latin races (and as such not so distantly related to the British) was the son of the herdsman Anchises, whom Venus chose to be the father of her son. The goddess chose her lover from the fields; not from a palace. Goat-footed Pan, the god of all, is the shepherds’ god, who initiated beautiful Paris, the chosen judge of beauty. Paris, a shepherd in the Italian upland, was the lover of beautiful Ænone, whom he deserted for licentious Venus. He did himself no good by casting off Ænone, his companion. Venus made game of him! Demeter, one of the most ancient of the circle of deities of Olympus, saved a child’s life from the fire; he was Triptolemus, afterwards the inventor of the plough. Demeter was the goddess of corn, the protectress of agriculture. Her child Persephone, carried away to the shades, where she was protected in winter, rose from thither as the almond blossoms heralded the approach of spring. Persephone was goddess of springtime, of its blossoms and flowers. The soul of the Greeks is read in their mythology. It is read also in her history. Athena was the protectress of Attica, and specially of Athens. It was she that brought the olive there, the origin of much wealth to the people, and it still is. When Paul preached from the “Areopagus” he faced the Acropolis of Athens, half a mile away. Over the top of the wall which contained the sacred buildings Paul saw the head of the golden spear of Athena gleaming from the bronze statue by Phidias of the virgin goddess, a beacon for ships as they passed the dangerous coast of Sunium to make for the harbour of Phaleron. Within that bronze effigy was a soul of the Athenian people as the statue was a symbol of it. Paul was not preaching anything new; he was concentrating a worship whose expansion, having left much of original simplicity behind, was giving way. Another primitive form of belief was taking root in monotheism, in which both shepherds and kings had taken a leading part. Apollo the Healer was to give way before the child of a Nazarene peasant and a humble carpenter. The Cross was to be the future beacon for a while until a new faith shall grow out of the old again.