difficult to believe in the vagaries of a supernatural ghostly order which, in direct opposition to the real heavenly order, is always distinguished by the fact that it stands outside any all-embracing dispensation, and allows full play to the caprice and malice of individual unseen powers. The irrational and the unaccountable is the natural element of the belief in ghosts and spirits; this is the source of the peculiar disquiet inspired by this province of belief or superstition. It owes most of its effect to the instability of its fibres. The Homeric world, on the contrary, lives by reason; its gods are fully intelligible to Greek minds and their forms and behaviour are clearly and easily comprehensible to Greek imagination. And the more distinctly were the gods represented, the more did the spirit-phantoms fade away into empty shadows. There was no one who might have been interested in the preservation and extension of the superstitious side of religion; there was in particular no priesthood with a monopoly of instruction or an exclusive knowledge of the details of ritual and the methods of controlling the behaviour of spirits. If anyone did possess any monopoly of teaching, it was, in this age when all the highest faculties of the spirit found their expression in poetry, the poet and the singer. They, however, showed a completely "secular" outlook even in religious matters. Indeed, these very clear-headed men, belonging to the same stock which in a later age "invented" (if one may be allowed to put it so science and philosophy, were already displaying a mental attitude that distantly threatened the whole system of that plastic representation of things spiritual which the older antiquity had laboriously constructed.