sharpened and made vivid an anthropomorphism which in its origin had been mostly the result of normal human laziness. The process of making winds and rivers into anthropomorphic gods is, for the most part, not the result of using the imagination with special vigour. It is the result of not doing so. The wind is obviously alive; any fool can see that. Being alive, it blows; how? why, naturally; just as you and I blow. It knocks things down, it shouts and dances, it whispers and talks. And, unless we are going to make a great effort of the imagination and try to realize, like a scientific man, just what really happens, we naturally assume that it does these things in the normal way, in the only way we know. Even when you worship a beast or a stone, you practically anthropomorphize it. It happens indeed to have a perfectly clear shape, so you accept that. But it talks, acts, and fights just like a man--as you can see from the _Australian Folk Tales_ published by Mrs. Langloh Parker--because you do not take the trouble to think out any other way of behaving. This kind of anthropomorphism--or as Mr. Gladstone used to call it, 'anthropophuism'--'humanity of _nature_'--is primitive and inevitable: the sharp-cut statue type of god is different, and is due in Greece directly to the work of the artists. We must get back behind these gods of the artist's workshop and the romance-maker's imagination, and see if the religious thinkers of the great period use, or imply, the same highly human conceptions. We shall find Parmenides telling us that God coincides with the universe, which is a sphere and immovable;[12:1] Heraclitus, that God is 'day night, summer winter, war peace, satiety hunger'. Xenophanes, that God is all-seeing, all-hearing, and all mind;[12:2] and as for his supposed human shape, why, if bulls and lions were to speak about God they would doubtless tell us that he was a bull or a lion.[12:3] We must notice the instinctive language of the poets, using the word θεός in many subtle senses for which our word 'God' is too stiff, too personal, and too anthropomorphic. Τό εὐτυχεῖν, 'the fact of success', is 'a god and more than a god'; τὸ γιγνώσκειν φίλους, 'the thrill of recognizing a friend' after long absence, is a 'god'; wine is a 'god' whose body is poured out in libation to gods; and in the unwritten law of the human conscience 'a great god liveth and groweth not old'.[12:4] You will say that is mere poetry or philosophy: it represents a particular theory or a particular metaphor. I think not. Language of this sort is used widely and without any explanation or apology. It was evidently understood and felt to be natural by the audience. If it is metaphorical, all metaphors have grown from the soil of current thought and normal experience. And without going into the point at length I think we may safely conclude that the soil from which such language as this grew was not any system of clear-cut personal anthropomorphic theology.