So long as either the Sacred Records, or the Light which supplied them, remained within reach, there were specific means either in operation, or at least accessible, which, as far as their range extended, would serve to check error, whether of practice or speculation, and to clear up uncertainty, as the sundial verifies or corrects the watch. But the stream darkened more and more, as it got farther from the source. The Pagan religion could boast of its unbroken traditions; like some forms of Christianity, and like the government of France until 1789. But its uninterrupted course was really an uninterrupted aberration from the line of truth; and to boast of the evenness of its motion was in effect to boast of the deadness of the conscience of mankind, which had not virtue enough even to disturb progressive degeneracy by occasional reproach. In later times, the Pagan system had its three aspects: it was one thing for the populace, another for statesmen, and a third for philosophers. But in Homer’s time it had suffered no criticism and no analysis: the human self-consciousness was scarcely awakened; introspection had not begun its work. Imagination and affection continually exercised their luxuriant energies in enlarging and developing the system of preternatural being and action. However copiously the element of fiction, nay, of falsehood, entered into it, yet for the masses of mankind it was still subjectively true[13]. [13] Grote, Hist. Greece, vol. i. p. 467. All was forward movement. Man had not, as it were, had time to ask himself, is this a lie? or even, whither does it tend? His soul, in those days of infancy, never questioned, always believed. Logical inconsistency, even moral solecism, did not repel it, nor slacken the ardour of its energies in the work of construction: construction of art, construction of manners, construction of polity, construction of religion. This is what we see, in glowing heat, throughout the poems of Homer, and it is perhaps the master key to their highest interest. They show us, in the province we are now considering, heroes earning their title to the Olympian life, mute nature everywhere adjusting herself to the scheme of supernatural impersonations, and religion allied to the human imagination, as closely as it was afterwards by Mahomet wedded to the sword. Everywhere we see that which is properly called myth, in the process of formation. Early mythology is the simple result of the working of the human mind, in a spirit of belief or of credulity, upon the material offered to it by prior tradition, by the physical universe, by the operations of the mind, and by the experience of life. We may, as follows, accompany the vicious series through which thought might probably be led, with respect to the theory of religion.