The idea of divine omniscience seems to have profoundly actuated the Greeks in the execution of all their great religious works. It gave perfection to every part of their edifices, essential and ornamental, and impressed upon each part alike a feeling purely devotional. What escaped the human eye, the Deity beheld, and therefore every mass and molding, frieze and pediment, bas-relief and statue, should be rendered equally worthy of that immortal Being to whom the edifice was consecrated. As fine a finish was bestowed upon the hidden portions as upon the exposed, as is proved by the fragmentary masterpieces we still possess, the most elaborated features of which were never seen from below when in their original positions. The material which Athens employed to eternize her mental conceptions was happily adapted in texture and tone to the end desired. On one side lay the quarries of sparkling Phenolic and veined Carystian, and, on the other side, the pearl-like beauty of Megarean; all of which, impregnated by the creative genius of the poets, and obedient to the talismanic touch of the sculptors, came forth from the marble tomb of Attica a new-born progeny stamped with all the lineaments of their noble parent. Thus, as the thought of Homer coalesced with the executive might of Phidias and his associates, the awful gods of his country spread an invincible palladium over the patriotic citizen, and rendered their terror ever present to the eyes of treachery and guilt. If the Sphinx, the Centaur, and Satyr were sometimes demanded by the legendary element of the ancestral East yet lingering in the national faith, the effort to subjugate the grotesque to the laws of beauty was no less successful than it was difficult, and twenty centuries have admired the result. The corporate religious crafts of India and Egypt were abandoned, but the divinest element therein was still preserved, and made to cast a hallowed spell over country and home, making each father the high priest of his domestic temple, and planting household gods round every hearth. An all-pervading religious influence was stamped on every rank of character, every region of nature, every type of art, and every department of enterprise. It exalted the dauntless courage of Miltiades, and added energy to the lofty daring of Themistocles, as they were conscious that the gods from Olympus gazed upon them in the fight, and were their guardians, as of old they had been to their ancestors on the plains of Troy.