Further, it is reasonable to remember that some of the powerful alteratives, which in subsequent ages told upon the form and substance of this wonderful mythology, had not begun to act in the time of Homer. These alteratives were speculative thought, and political interests. Philosophy, ever dangerous to the popular religion of Greece in the days of its maturity and prosperity, became its ally in the period of its decline, when its original vitality had entirely ebbed away, and when the _Vexilla Regis_, raised aloft throughout the Roman empire, drove it to seek refuge in holes and corners. Then the wit of man was set to repair the tottering fabric; to apologize for what was profligate, to invent reasons for what was void of meaning, to frame relations between the depraved mythology, and the moral government of the world. Even that corrupt and wicked system had, as it were, its epoch of death-bed repentance. The services thus rendered by philosophers were late and ineffectual; but it was the civil power, which had been all along the greatest conservator of the classical mythology. It felt itself to have an interest in surrounding public authority with a veneration greater than this world could supply: a commanding interest, with the pursuit of which its necessities forbade it to dispense. Whatever exercised an influence in subduing and enthralling the popular mind, answered its purpose in the view of the civil magistrate. Hence his multifarious importations into religion, each successively introduced for this purely subjective and temporal reason, removed it farther and farther from the ground of truth. Every story that he added to the edifice made its fall more certain and more terrible. _Numerosa parabat excelsæ turris tabulata._ But in Homer’s time there is no trace of this employment of religion by governments, as a means of sheer imposition upon their subjects. So likewise in Homer there is no sign that conscious speculation on these subjects had begun. Indeed, of that kind of thought which involves a clear mental self-consciousness, we may perhaps say, that the first beginning, at least for Europe and the West, is marked by the very curious simile in the Iliad[18]-- [18] Il. xv. 80. ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀΐξῃ νόος ἀνέρος κ.τ.λ. Homer, then, spoke out in simplicity, and in good faith, the religion of his day, under those forms of poetry with which all religions have a well-grounded affinity: for the imagination, which is the fountain-head of poetic forms, is likewise a genuine, though faint, picture, of that world which religion realizes, through Faith its groundwork, ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen[19].’ [19] Heb. xi. 1.