inferior in pure spirituality and of more restricted significance as a factor in the evolution of humanity, it at least remained free from the ecclesiastical tyranny, the murderous fanaticism, and the unlovely superstitions of mediaeval faith. But polytheism under any form was fatally incapable of coping with the new spirit of enquiry awakened by philosophy, and the old myths, with their naturalistic crudities, could not long satisfy the reason and conscience of thinkers who had learned in another school to seek everywhere for a central unity of control, and to bow their imaginations before the passionless perfection of eternal law. III. Such a thinker was Xenophanes, of Colophon. Driven, like Pythagoras, from his native city by civil discords, he spent the greater part of an unusually protracted life wandering through the Greek colonies of Sicily and Southern Italy, and reciting his own verses, not always, as it would appear, to a very attentive audience. Elea, an Italiote city, seems to have been his favourite resort, and the school of philosophy which he founded there has immortalised the name of this otherwise obscure Phocaean settlement. Enough remains of his verses to show with what terrible strength of sarcasm he assailed the popular religion of Hellas. ‘Homer and Hesiod,’ he exclaims, ‘have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among men—theft, adultery, and mutual deception.’[12] Nor is Xenophanes content with attacking these unedifying stories, he strikes at the anthropomorphic conceptions which lay at their root. ‘Mortals think that the gods have senses, and a voice and a body like their own. The negroes fancy that their deities are black-skinned and snub-nosed, the Thracians give theirs fair hair and blue eyes; if horses or lions had hands and could paint, they too would make gods in their own image.’[13] It was, he declared, as impious to believe in the birth of a god as to believe in the possibility of his death. The current polytheism was equally false. ‘There is one Supreme God among gods and men, unlike mortals both in mind and body.’[14] There can be only one God, for God is Omnipotent, so that there must be none to dispute his will. He must also be perfectly homogeneous, shaped like a sphere, seeing, hearing, and thinking with every part alike, never moving from place to place, but governing all things by an effortless exercise of thought. Had such daring heresies been promulgated in democratic Athens, their author would probably have soon found himself and his works handed over to the tender mercies of the Eleven. Happily at Elea, and in most other Greek states, the gods were left to take care of themselves.