his teaching illustrates the freedom of the atmosphere in which these men lived.  He went about from city to city, calling in question on moral grounds the popular beliefs about the gods and goddesses, and ridiculing the anthropomorphic conceptions which the Greeks had formed of their divinities.  “If oxen had hands and the capacities of men, they would make gods in the shape of oxen.”  This attack on received

[24] theology was an attack on the veracity of the old poets, especially Homer, who was considered the highest authority on mythology.  Xenophanes criticized him severely for ascribing to the gods acts which, committed by men, would be considered highly disgraceful.  We do not hear that any attempt was made to restrain him from thus assailing traditional beliefs and branding Homer as immoral.  We must remember that the Homeric poems were never supposed to be the word of God.  It has been said that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks.  The remark exactly misses the truth.  The Greeks fortunately had no Bible, and this fact was both an expression and an important condition of their freedom.  Homer’s poems were secular, not religious, and it may be noted that they are freer from immorality and savagery than sacred books that one could mention.  Their authority was immense; but it was not binding like the authority of a sacred book, and so Homeric criticism was never hampered like Biblical criticism.

In this connexion, notice may be taken of another expression and condition of freedom, the absence of sacerdotalism.  The priests of the temples never became powerful castes, tyrannizing over the community in their own interests and able to silence voices raised against religious beliefs.  The civil authorities

[25] kept the general control of public worship in their own hands, and, if some priestly families might have considerable influence, yet as a rule the priests were virtually State servants whose voice carried no weight except concerning the technical details of ritual.

To return to the early philosophers, who were mostly materialists, the record of their speculations is an interesting chapter in the history of rationalism.  Two great names may be selected, Heraclitus and Democritus, because they did more perhaps than any of the others, by sheer hard thinking, to train reason to look upon the universe in new ways and to shock the unreasoned conceptions of common sense.  It was startling to be taught, for the first time, by Heraclitus, that the appearance of stability and permanence which material things present to our senses is a false appearance, and that the world and everything in it are changing every instant.  Democritus performed the amazing feat of working out an atomic theory of the universe, which was revived in the seventeenth century and is connected, in the history of speculation, with the most modern physical and chemical theories of matter.  No fantastic tales of creation, imposed by sacred authority, hampered these powerful brains.