But the hours, in which the Greeks of the historical age attained by a sort of religious frenzy such intimacy with their gods as their ancestors were famed to have enjoyed all their life long, were few and far between. The means of communion had become in general less direct, less personal. Yet even so the desire for communion continued unabated, and the belief in it still pervaded every phase of life. Intellectual progress had curiously little effect upon the dominant religious ideas. A strongly conservative attachment to ancient tradition and custom was strangely blended with that progressive spirit which made the intellectual development of the Athenians unique in its swiftness, as in its scope, among all peoples known to history. Their minds welcomed new speculations, new doctrines; but their hearts clung to the old unreasonable faith. Ancestral ideas remained for them the sole foundation of religion. Each poet or philosopher in drama or in dialogue, each man in his own heart, was free to build upon it and to ornament his superstructure as he would; and his work found a certain sanction in the appeal which it made to other men’s sense of truth and of beauty. But for the foundation the _fiat_ of antiquity had been pronounced and was immutable. Plato’s reasoned exposition of the soul’s immortality culminates in an Apocalypse ratified by the old mythology; and a quotation from Homer ever served to quash or to confirm the subtlest argument. That the foundation-stone was not, in the estimate of reason, well and truly laid, that the basis of religion was insecure, must have been obvious to many. Pindar saw it, and, by refusing to impute to the gods any deed or purpose which his own heart condemned as ungodly, strove to repair its defects; Euripides too saw it, and scoffed at those who would build on so unstable a base. But the mass of men, though they also must have seen, were little troubled, it would seem, either to demolish or to repair. They accepted the old beliefs and ceremonies because they were sanctioned by the authority or the experience of past ages; and if sober reasoning and criticism exposed flaws and inconsistencies therein, what matter? They were, as they still are, a people incapable of any mental equilibrium; the mood of the hour swayed them now to emotions, now to reasonings; they did not cultivate consistency; they could not sit still and preserve an even balance between the passions of the heart and the judgements of the intellect, but threw their whole selves into the one scale, and the other for the moment was as vanity.