In a description of Greek life it is impossible entirely to pass over the many customs connected with the worship of the gods, and their importance in the life of individuals. Greek religion did not appoint any fixed ceremonies to be observed every day, as the Jewish or Mahometan religions do; but still it placed a believer in connection with the Deity, and thus gave occasion for some religious act every day. There were also some special occasions which led them to turn to their gods, and it is, therefore, natural that religious worship should have played a very important part in the life of the Greeks, especially as it was only in rare cases that they required to resort to the mediatory help of a priest; as a rule, any Greek might perform the various religious ceremonies himself. It is a disputed question whether Greek natural religion in its first beginnings was acquainted with temples, images of the gods, and priests as a separate class; in any case, in the oldest literary monument of Greek life, the Homeric poems, worship was chiefly in the hands of laymen, and service in the temples and priesthood generally played a very subordinate part in the life of mankind. Greek religion was unacquainted with regular worship returning on certain appointed days, for which priests and laymen assembled together in the House of God. It is true the temple was regarded as the dwelling of the god; but the believer, as a rule, only entered it if he had some special prayer to make, and otherwise performed his religious duties at home in his own dwelling. This he could generally do without the help of a priest; the priest existed, in the first place, for the sake of the god, and only in the second in order to facilitate the intercourse between god and man. The gods desired worship and sacrifice, and, as it could not be left to chance whether some one person would supply these, since there must be no interruption to the worship, it was necessary to have a class of men whose work in life was the performance of these duties towards the divinity. It was probably this idea which led them to appoint a priestly class; and it was only as a consequence of this that laymen sometimes called upon the help of the priest, especially in important cases, since these men, who were in constant intercourse with the gods, were assumed to have the most accurate knowledge of the forms well-pleasing to the divinities. Consequently, as the development of civilisation made greater claims on ordinary people in their professional activity, such as military service, politics, studies, etc., and thus drew them away from divine things, it became commoner to make use of the mediatory assistance of the priest, and thus the influence and importance of the priestly class continued to increase. There was another reason which led the laymen to make use of the priests. According to Greek belief, the gods revealed their will to