"On us you depend, and to us you repair For counsel and aid, when a marriage is made, A purchase, a bargain, a venture in trade; Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye, An ox or an ass, that may happen to pass, A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet, A name or a word by chance overheard, You deem it an omen, and call it a Bird." [Footnote: Aristoph. "Birds" 717.--Frere's translation.] Aristophanes, of course, is jesting; but how serious and important this art of divination must have appeared even to the most cultivated Athenians may be gathered from a passage of the tragedian Aeschylus, where he mentions it as one of the benefits conferred by Prometheus on mankind, and puts it on a level with the arts of building, metal-making, sailing, and the like, and the sciences of arithmetic and astronomy. And if anyone were dissatisfied with this method of interpretation by signs, he had a directer means of approaching the gods. He could visit one of the oracles and consult the deity at first hand about his most trivial and personal family affairs. Some of the questions put to the oracle at Dodona have been preserved to us, [Footnote: See Percy Gardner, "New Chapters in Greek History."] and very curious they are. "Who stole my cushions and pillow?" asks one bereaved householder. Another wants to know whether it will pay him to buy a certain house and farm; another whether sheep-farming is a good investment. Clearly, the god was not above being consulted on the meanest affairs; and his easy accessibility must have been some compensation for his probable caprice. Nor must it be supposed that this phase of the Greek religion was a superstition confined to individuals; on the contrary, it was fully recognised by the state. No important public act could be undertaken without a previous consultation of omens. More than once, in the clearest and most brilliant period of the Greek civilisation, we hear of military expeditions being abandoned because the sacrifices were unfavourable; and at the time of the Persian invasion, at the most critical moment of the history of Greece, the Lacedaemonians, we are told, came too late to be present at the battle of Marathon, because they thought it unlucky to start until the moon was full. In all this we have a suggestion of the sort of relation in which the Greek conceived himself to stand to the gods. It is a relation, as we said, external and mechanical. The gods were superior beings who knew, it might be presumed, what was going to happen; man didn't know, but perhaps he could find out. How could he find out? that was the problem; and it was answered in the way we have seen. There was no question, clearly, of a spiritual relation; all is external; and a similar externality pervades, on the whole, the Greek view of sacrifice and of sin. Let us turn now to consider this point. Section 8. Sacrifice and Atonement.