It would be a hopeless task to trace with accuracy the theology of the earliest periods, buried as it is under a mass of allegory and fable which can not now be removed. Yet there are indications of a purer morality, and a more worthy faith, than is portrayed in the anthropomorphic mythology of the Hesiodic and Homeric poems. Inachus is supposed to have migrated from the Asian shore about the same time the Israelites entered Egypt. Then, the worship prevalent among the Nomadic tribes of Asia, according to Job, was that of one almighty Creator, typified by, and already half confounded with light, either the sun or other celestial bodies. Plato speaks vaguely of the divine unity, and Aristotle more distinctly avers, that "it was an ancient saying received by all from their ancestors, that all things exist by and through the power of God, who being one, was known by many names according to his modes of manifestation." In the opening chapter of this work, allusion was made to the Kylas mountain in Asia, from the lofty terraces of which the ancestors of the Greeks descended, bringing with them to Hellas a memento of their origin in the word _koilon_, which they used to designate heaven, and illustrating their hereditary theology by going for congenial worship to the loftiest shrines. The best authority tells us that they were exceedingly religious, a fact which even their grossest errors confirm. Endowed with the most acute and active sensibilities, the Greek sought to satisfy the ardent aspirations of his devout spirit; he even yearned to be himself enrolled among the deified heroes whom his valor or imagination had exalted to the dazzling halls of Olympus. This general impulse may be illustrated by particular examples, as in the subtle Themistocles and majestic Pericles, who placidly hailed in worship traditions discarded by the historic mind as transparent fictions. So powerful and all pervading was the religiousness of the cultivated Greeks, that the same judgment which so profoundly harmonized with the severe grandeur of the Olympian Jove, enthroned by Phidias amid the marshaled columns of the national temple, bowed to the legend of Aphrodite, the foam-born queen of Love. Heroism and piety were perpetually invigorated at costly fanes; and how deeply the spirit of worship and belief in retribution, were impressed upon the most powerful intellect, is shown by the awful apostrophe of Demosthenes to the heroes who fell at Marathon, and the breathless attention which then absorbed the very soul of the Athenian.