Pheidias pleads in his defence that the artist could not, if he would, desert the ancient religious tradition, which was consecrated in popular imagination by the romance of poetry;2028 that is fixed for ever. Granted that the Divine nature is far removed from us, and far beyond our ken; yet, as little children separated from their parents, feel a strong yearning for them and stretch out their hands vainly in their dreams, so the race of man, from love and kindred, longs ever to draw nigh to the unseen God by prayer and sacrifice and visible symbol. The ruder races will image their god in trees or shapeless stones, or may seek a strange symbol in some of the lower forms of animal life.2029 The higher may find sublime expression of His essence in the sun and starry spheres. For the pure and infinite mind which has engendered and which sustains the universe of life, no sculptor or painter of Hellas has ever found, or can ever find, full and adequate expression.2030 Hence men take refuge in the vehicle and receptacle of the noblest spirit known to them, the form of man. And the Infinite Spirit, of which the human is an effluence, may perhaps best be embodied in the form of His child.2031 But no effort or ecstasy of artistic fancy, in form or colour, can ever follow the track of the Homeric imagination in its majesty and infinite variety of expression. The sculptor and painter have fixed limits set to their skill, beyond which they cannot pass. They can appeal only to the eye; their material has not the infinite ductility and elasticity of the poetic dialect of many tribes and many generations. They can seize only a single moment of action or passion, and fix it for ever in bronze or stone. Yet Pheidias, with a certain [pg 383]modest self-assertion, pleads that his conception of the Olympian Zeus, although less various and seductive than Homer’s, although he cannot present to the gazer the crashing thunderbolt or the baleful star, or the heaving of Olympus, is perhaps more elevating and inspiring.2032 The Zeus of Pheidias is the peace-loving and gentle providence of an undisturbed and harmonious Greece, the august giver of all good gifts, the father and saviour and guardian of men. The many names by which men call him may each find some answering trait in the laborious work of the chisel. In the lines of that majestic and benign image are shadowed forth the mild king and father, the hearer of prayer, the guardian of civic order and family love, the protector of the stranger, and the power who gives fertile increase to flock and field. The Zeus of Pheidias and of Dion is a God of mercy and peace, with no memory of the wars of the Giants.2033

Dion is a popular teacher of morality, not a thinker or theologian. But this excursion into the field of theology shows him at his best. And it prepares us for the study of some more formal efforts to find a theology in the poetry of legend.