men in the islands of the blest, because they had been nobler and more righteous than those of the age of bronze and had stemmed for a time the current of degeneracy--the fifth age in which the depravity of man grows apace and soon there will be nought but discord between father and son, and no regard will be paid to guest nor comrade nor brother, and children will slight their aged parents, and the voice of gods will be unknown to them[787]--to one school of thought, I say, it was simply and solely this decline of the human race, swift and only once checked, that was held accountable for their estrangement from the powers above them. But such thinkers were in a minority. Humility and self-dissatisfaction were and are qualities foreign to the ordinary Greek. He observed the wide gulf that separated him from those whom he worshipped, but without any sense of unworthiness, without any depression of spirit. He was not despondent over his own shortcomings and limitations, but was filled rather with a larger complacency in the thought that, incapable though he might be to reproduce actually in his own life and character much of the beauty and nobility of his gods, he was so gifted in mind and godlike in understanding, that in his moments of highest imagination and most spiritual exaltation he could soar to that loftier plane whereon was enacted all the divine life, and could visualise his gods and feel the closeness of their presence. The motive of the highest acts of Greek worship seems to have been not the self-abasement of the worshipper and the glorification of the worshipped, but rather an obliteration of the distinctions between man and god, and a temporary attainment by the human of spiritual equality and companionship with the divine. The votary of Bacchus in his hours of wildest ecstacy enjoyed so completely this sense of equality and of real union with the god, that even to others it seemed fitting that he should be called by the god’s own name[788].