The Gentile and the Jew in the Courts of the Temple of Christ

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IDEAS OF THE DEITY 15 sons of gods make their appearance, here and there, in the old Latin and Roman sagas; but their birth was explained in a different way from that of the Greek myths; the god had appeared as a phallus in the ashes of the hearth, or as a spark had shot from out the hearth into the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IDEAS OF THE DEITY 15 sons of gods make their appearance, here and there, in the old Latin and Roman sagas; but their birth was explained in a different way from that of the Greek myths; the god had appeared as a phallus in the ashes of the hearth, or as a spark had shot from out the hearth into the woman's womb. The chief deities of the Romans, before they had been coloured by Greek inspiration, were general nature-powers, or mere abstractions of the human state; they advanced to no real personality, but, on the contrary, remained far behind the plastic individualisation of the Hellenic deity-world. The Romans had no religious poetry, no Homer or Hesiod to give their gods a form, and breathe life into them. Their sacerdotal books, besides being inaccessible to the people, contained only dry registers of the names of gods, with a short account of their sphere of action, and the peculiarities of their rites. This was all changed when the Roman circle of gods was enlarged by numerous accessions from without, and many of their forms were humanised by being blended together with corresponding Greek deities; but Under the influence of Greek mythology, and, somewhat later, of Greek philosophy, the old reverence for the gods died away; the firm belief in the universality and comprehensiveness of their power was shaken; and the downfall of the state religion, like a severe internal and incurable malady, began with attacking the upper ranks, and so infected the whole body of the state. The importance of Greek mythology to the Roman religious system must not, however, be estimated by the position which it occupied in Roman literature. The poets made many myths and mythical ideas their own, as poetical matter, which never passed into the religious creed of the Roman people. Among t...