All these conclusions, and some others of equal importance to which we will return later, are expressed or symbolized in the great Dromena, festivals, mysteries, or whatever you may call these rites of pre-Homeric Greece. Then, for a time, they are partially, though never totally, eclipsed, by the brilliant beauty of the Olympian religion with its glorious temples, statues, and other works of art. The Olympian gods had conquered the world. They practise neither agriculture nor industry, nor any honest work. They fight and feast and drink and play. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. The Olympian religion had its time and place, and did its work. It swept out many indecent features of the older cults, many superstitions and abuses. It suited the Achæans and their civilization exactly, and we can never forget its "sheer beauty," But it went bankrupt, lost its hold on men's minds and hearts, failed and faded out. Professor Murray compares its end to that of a garden of rare exotic flowers overrun by the rank weeds which it had temporarily displaced. Miss Harrison more justly compares it to a flower withering because cut off from its roots. There was vastly more vitality in the ancient crude symbols and chaos of conceptions than in the ordered and artistic Olympian hierarchy with its marvellous representations of the gods in human or superhuman form and beauty. Even its art and literature could not save it. It had lost its mysticism. The old Neolithic religion, handed down by peasants and artisans reoccupied the field, transformed sometimes almost beyond recognition, like the Ugly Duckling of the fairy tale. It returned triumphant through sheer power of unlimited vitality and adaptability. Plato draws his finest illustrations from its mysteries, out of which, also, the Greek drama arose. Paul quotes from them or from a similar stratum of belief. Some of the many sources of its vitality are obvious. It was rooted in the firm conviction of the existence of a spiritual world toward and into which its every rootlet was forcing its way and from which it drew nourishment and power. We might better change the illustration and say that it was slowly developing a spiritual eye which peered into a higher world and developed in keenness and clearness of vision in response to the higher pulsations. By patient experiment and experience, which produced a hope that could not make ashamed and a faith in which hope and experiment combined, it was feeling its way into spiritual knowledge. It knew nothing of practical science or of material cause and effect. But its world pulsated with the universal life. It recognized the law of forbidden things and the sure penalty of law-breaking. It had a tribal conscience and recognized the need of purification. It had the promise, at least, of individual conscience and consciousness of sin.