At another point too we are in great danger of importing modern notions into ancient conditions. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all book-religions. The final source of their doctrines is a revelation that has been written down, and is extant as an actual and easily accessible book. Moreover, it is the narrative portion of this book that is the best-known part of it, and that is generally associated in the popular mind with it. In the same way, we are prone to think of Greek religion as a series of extraordinarily beautiful myths or narratives of gods and heroes, which have likewise been written down, and are extant in the poems and dramas of which they are the subject. This view has been greatly strengthened by the unfortunate currency of the epigram that Homer was the Greek Bible. No one would be inclined to force, except as a paradox, the analogy upon which the statement rests; yet the phrase is so terse and simple, and the elements of the comparison are so generally familiar, that consciously and unconsciously current conceptions are moulded by it. Now if the epigram quoted is essentially true, we have at once a measure of Greek religious feeling, since the Homeric poems are as accessible to us as to the Greeks themselves. We should be compelled to reckon with variety in the interpretation of the text, but in the literal signification there would always be a point of departure. And we should at once realize that for divine beings depicted as they are by Homer a devotion of a very different sort is demanded from that which modern faiths give their Deity. Nor does later literature represent the gods on a loftier moral plane. When we read Aristophanes,[6] it becomes still more difficult to understand how the gods could retain their divinity not only when deprived of their moral character, but even when stripped of their dignity. So far from raising the moral character of the divine beings who are the actors in these legends, the later versions of many quite unexceptionable myths deliberately debase them by subjecting most actions to a foully erotic interpretation.[7] The less offensive narrative, to be sure, survives as well, but it is to be noted that the divinity of the personages in question seems to be as unquestioned in the corrupt as in the purer form of the story.