The nature, prevalence, and uniformity of sacrifice, should be regarded as another portion of the primeval inheritance, which, from various causes, was perhaps the best preserved of all its parts among nations that had broken the link of connection with the source.
Of the sabbatical institution, which the Holy Scripture appears to fix at the creation of man, we find no trace in Homer. But it is easy to perceive that this highly spiritual ordinance was one little likely to survive the rude shocks and necessities of earthly life, while it could not, like sacrifice, derive a sustaining force from appearing to confer upon the gods an absolute gift, profitable to them, and likely to draw down their favour in return.
Those who feel inclined to wonder at this disappearance of the sabbath from the record may do well to remember, that on the shield of Achilles, which represents the standing occasions of life in all its departments, there is no one scene which represents any observances simply religious. The religious element, though corrupted, was far from being expelled out of common life; on the contrary, the whole tissue of it was pervaded by that element; but it was in a combined, not in a separate, and therefore not in a sabbatical form.
And again, in order to appreciate the unlikelihood that such a tradition as that of the sabbath would long survive the severance from Divine Revelation in this wintry world, we have only to consider how rapidly it is forgotten, in our own time, by Christians in heathen lands, or by those Christian settlers who are severed for the time at least from civilization, and whose energies are absorbed in a ceaseless conflict with the yet untamed powers of nature.
_The inventive Element of the Homeric Theo-mythology._
I come now to that mass of Homeric deities, who are either wholly mythological, or so loaded with mythological features, that their traditive character is depressed, and of secondary importance.
The character of Jupiter, which commonly occupies the first place in discussions of the Greek mythology, has been in some degree forestalled by our prior examination of the position of other figures in the system, which are both more interesting and more important, from their bearing more significant resemblances to and traces of the truth of Divine Revelation.