First of all, let us try to estimate the strength of this old Mediterranean Paganism.  It was strong in its great traditions.  Plutarch, who lived from about 50 A.D. to 117 or so, is our great exponent of this old religion.  To him I shall have to refer constantly.  He was a writer of charm, a man with many gifts.  Plutarch’s Lives was the great staple of education in the Renaissance—­and as good a one, perhaps, as we have yet discovered, even in this age when there are so many theories of education with foreign names.  Plutarch, then, writing about Delphi, the shrine and oracle of the god Apollo, said that men had been “in anguish and fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years”—­and Delphi has not lost it.  For ninety generations the god has been giving oracles to the Greek world, to private people, to kings, to cities, to nations—­and on all sorts of subjects, on the foundation of colonies, the declaration of wars, personal guidance and the hope of heirs.  You may test the god where you will, Plutarch claimed, you will not find an instance of a false oracle.  Readers of Greek history will remember another great writer of as much charm, five hundred years before, Herodotus, who was not so sure about all the oracles.  But let us think what it means,—­to look back over three thousand years of one faith, unbroken.  Egyptian religion had been unchallenged for longer still, even if we allow Plutarch’s three thousand years.  The oldest remains in Egypt antedate, we are told, 4000 B.C., and all through history, with the exception of the solitary reign of Amen-Hotep III., Egypt worshipped the same gods, with additions, as time went on.  Again an unbroken tradition.  And how long, under various names, had Cybele, Mother of Gods, been worshipped in Asia?  By our era all these religions were fused into one religion, of many cults and rites and ancient traditions; and the incredible weight of old tradition in that world is hard to overestimate.

The old religion was strong in the splendour of its art and its architecture.  The severe, beautiful lines of the Greek temple are familiar to us still; and, until I saw the Taj, I think I should have doubted whether there could be anything more beautiful.  Architecture was consecrated to the gods, and so was art.  You go to Delphi, said Plutarch, and see those wonderful works of the ancient artists and sculptors, as fresh still as if they had left the chisel yesterday, and they had stood there for hundreds of years, wonderful in their beauty.  Think of some of the remains of the Greek art—­of that Victory, for instance, which the Messenians set on the temple at Olympia in 421 B.C.  She stood on a block of stone on the temple, but the block was painted blue, so that, as the spectator came up, he saw the temple and the angle of its roof, and then a gap of blue sky and the goddess just alighting on the summit of the temple.  From what is left of her, broken and headless, but still beautiful, we can picture her flying through the air—­the