What is most noticeable about the Egyptian, and also about the Babylonian, architecture of temples and {141} tombs is their enormous size. They seem to have tried to impress the imagination of men by buildings of such size that men going in and out of them are no bigger than ants, comparatively. And they succeed in being impressive in this way. They are terrifying. But the Greek works do not terrify. They are works of pure beauty, and it is their beauty which still charms us as no other work of its kind has ever done. [Illustration: CORINTHIAN ARCHITECTURE (MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES).] The sculptures, as I said, are seen chiefly in what remains of the temples, and most of the statues are of gods and goddesses and heroes who were supposed to be super-human; but although they took those divine and half-divine persons as the objects and models of their art, the gods and all that had to do with religion seem to have been of far less importance in the lives of these Greeks than they were in the lives of any of {142} the people whom we have met in the whole course of our story. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the peoples of Syria and Palestine, and the Persians all were very much occupied with doing service to their gods, and some of them regulated their lives very much by doing what they thought the gods would wish them to do. With the Greeks, religious ceremonies, or acting as the gods would have them act, hardly came into their lives at all. The persons of Homer's poems pay more attention to the gods than the Greeks of the later time to which we have now come. The former do seem to have had an idea that the chief of the gods, whom they called Zeus, living on top of Mount Olympus with inferior gods and goddesses about him, did interfere with the affairs of men and did punish men who did not do the divine will. But it was a religion that a people so intelligent as these later Greeks could hardly be expected to believe in. They seem to have kept up some pretence of belief, for it was brought as part of a charge against the great philosopher Socrates, on which he was actually condemned to death, that he had spoken impiously of the gods, but we may suspect that this was only used against him by enemies who really had as little respect as he had for such gods as these. At all events, I do not think that we shall be wrong in saying that these Greeks had no religion at all which made really any difference in their lives until Christianity was brought to them by the Jews, and especially by St. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles--which means to the peoples that were not of Jewish race.