There is more of it. How unpretending it is and yet how searching! And in the whole there is no petition for any material blessing, and--most striking of all--it is addressed to no personal god. It is pure prayer. Of course, to some it will feel thin and cold. Most men demand of their religion more outward and personal help, more physical ecstasy, a more heady atmosphere of illusion. No one man's attitude towards the Uncharted can be quite the same as his neighbour's. In part instinctively, in part superficially and self-consciously, each generation of mankind reacts against the last. The grown man turns from the lights that were thrust upon his eyes in childhood. The son shrugs his shoulders at the watchwords that thrilled his father, and with varying degrees of sensitiveness or dullness, of fuller or more fragmentary experience, writes out for himself the manuscript of his creed. Yet, even for the wildest or bravest rebel, that manuscript is only a palimpsest. On the surface all is new writing, clean and self-assertive. Underneath, dim but indelible in the very fibres of the parchment, lie the characters of many ancient aspirations and raptures and battles which his conscious mind has rejected or utterly forgotten. And forgotten things, if there be real life in them, will sometimes return out of the dust, vivid to help still in the forward groping of humanity. A religious system like that of Eusebius or Marcus, or even Sallustius, was not built up without much noble life and strenuous thought and a steady passion for the knowledge of God. Things of that make do not, as a rule, die for ever. FOOTNOTES: [177:1] _De Vit. Contempl._, p. 477 M. [177:2] _Conf._ ix. 9. [178:1] Gibbon, chap. xxi, notes 161, 162. [178:2] _Rise of the Greek Epic_, chap. i. [180:1] ἄδολος καὶ καθαρὰ παρρησία. [181:1] 'Many of his sections come straight from Plotinus: xiv and xv perhaps from Porphyry's _Letter to Marcella_, an invaluable document for the religious side of Neo-Platonism. A few things (prayer to the souls of the dead in iv, to the Cosmos in xvii, the doctrine of τύχη, in ix) are definitely un-Plotinian: probably concessions to popular religion.'--_E. R. D._ [188:1] S. Reinach, _Orpheus_, p. 273 (Engl. trans., p. 185). [188:2] See Ammianus, xxii. 12, on the bad effect of Julian's sacrifices. Sacrifice was finally forbidden by the emperor Theodosius in 391. It was condemned by Theophrastus, and is said by Porphyry (_De Abstinentia_, ii. 11) simply λαβεῖν τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐξ ἀδικίας. [189:1] Sallustius's view of sacrifice is curiously like the illuminating theory of MM. Hubert and Mauss, in which they define primitive sacrifice as a medium, a bridge or lightning-conductor, between the profane and the sacred. 'Essai sur la Nature et la Fonction du Sacrifice' (_Année Sociologique_, ii. 1897-8), since republished in the _Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions_, 1909.