Having removed some objections to art, I would add a few words to artists on the cause of the fine arts in Greece, from a paper I, two years ago, contributed to a monthly periodical.[4] That the mythology of Greece had an influence over its arts, is generally granted; but I am not aware, that it has either been shown to be exclusively their cause, or that its mode of operation has ever been explained. Religion, I may observe, is as natural to man as his weakness and helplessness. There is not one of its systems, not even the vilest, which has not afforded him consolation. Of its higher and better systems, some are equally admirable for the grandeur and the beauty of the truths on which they are founded, the simplicity and the elegance of their ostensible forms, the power and applicability of their symbols, and their sympathy with, and control over, the affections and the imagination. These high characteristics peculiarly distinguished the religion of ancient Greece. By bigots, we are indeed told, that, though Homer is our model in epic, Anacreon in lyric, and Æschylus in dramatic poetry--though the music of Greece doubtless corresponded to its poetry in beauty, pathos, and grandeur--though the mere wreck of her sculpture is never overlooked in modern war and negotiation--though the mere sight of her ruined Parthenon is more than a reward for the fatigue or the peril of a journey to the Eternal city--though these products of art are the test of the highest civilization which the world has witnessed--though to these chiefly Rome owed the little civilization of which she was capable, and we ourselves the circumstance that, at this hour, we are not, like our ancestors, covered only with blue paint or the skins of brutes--though all this is true as to the arts of Greece, we are told that, by the strangest exception, the religion of Greece was a base superstition. That religion, however, was the creator of these arts. They not only could not have existed without it, but they probably could never have been called into existence by any other religion.