But these tendencies to draw a moral from all that Homer wrote, and to read philosophy into it, though common and permanent, were not universal. There was an instinct in the Greek mind, as there is in modern times, which rebelled against them. There were literalists who insisted that the words should be taken as they stood, and that some of the words as they stood were clearly immoral.[78] There were, on the other hand, apologists who said sometimes that Homer reflected faithfully the chequered lights and shadows of human life, and sometimes that the existence of immorality in Homer must clearly be allowed, but that if a balance were struck between the good and the evil, the good would be found largely to predominate.[79] There were other apologists who made a distinction between the divine and the human elements: the poets sometimes spoke, it was said, on their own account: some of their poetry was inspired, and some was not: the Muses sometimes left them: “and they may very properly be forgiven if, being men, they made mistakes when the divinity which spoke through their mouths had gone away from them.”[80] But all these apologies were insufficient. The chasm between the older religion which was embodied in the poets, and the new ideas which were marching in steady progress away from the Homeric world, was widening day by day. A reconciliation had to be found which had deeper roots. It was found in a process of interpretation whose strength must be measured by its permanence. The process was based upon a natural tendency. The unseen working of the will which lies behind all voluntary actions, and the unseen working of thought which by an instinctive process causes some of those actions to be symbolical, led men in comparatively early times to find a meaning beneath the surface of a record or representation of actions. A narrative of actions, no less than the actions themselves, might be symbolical. It might contain a hidden meaning. Men who retained their reverence for Homer, or who at least were not prepared to break with the current belief in him, began to search for such meanings. They were assisted in doing so by the concomitant development of the “mysteries.” The mysteries were representations of passages in the history of the gods which, whatever their origin, had become symbolical. It is possible that no words of explanation were spoken in them; but they were, notwithstanding, habituating the Greek mind both to symbolical expression in general, and to the finding of physical or religious or moral truths in the representation of fantastic or even immoral actions.[81]