Thus, for example, although the Greek is popularly accepted as the type of paganism and the Christian of idealism, yet the lines of that distinction have often been reversed. Christianity has at times become hard and cold and lifeless, and has swept away primitive national idealisms without supplying any new ones. The Roman ploughman must have missed the fauns whom he had been accustomed to expect in the thicket at the end of his furrow, when the new faith told him that these were nothing but rustling leaves. When the swish of unseen garments beside the old nymph-haunted fountain was silenced, his heart was left lonely and his imagination impoverished. Much charm and romance vanished from his early world with the passing of its pagan creatures, and indeed it is to this cause that we must trace the extraordinarily far-reaching and varied crop of miraculous legends of all sorts which sprang up in early Catholic times. These were the protest of unconscious idealism against the bare world from which its sweet presences had vanished.
"In th' olde dayes of the King Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, Al was this land fulfild of fayerye. The elf-queen, with hir joly companye, Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede; This was the olde opinion, as I rede. But now can no man see none elves mo. For now the grete charitee and prayeres Of limitours and othere holy freres,
This maketh that there been no fayeryes. For ther as wont to walken was an elf, Ther walketh now the limitour himself."
Against this impoverishment the human revolt was inevitable, and it explains the spirit in such writers as Shelley and Goethe. Children of nature, who love the sun and the grass, and are at home upon the earth, their spirits cry for something to delight and satisfy them, nearer than speculations of theology or cold pictures of heaven. Wordsworth, in his famous lines, has expressed the protest in the familiar words:--
"Great God, I'd rather be A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."
The early classic thought which found its most perfect expression in the mythology of Greece was not originally or essentially pagan. It was humanistic, and represented the response of man's spirit to that free and beautiful spirit which he found in nature around him. All such symbolism of Greek religion as that of the worship of Dionysus and Ceres, shows this. In these cults the commonest things of life, the wine and corn wherewith man sustained himself, assumed a higher and richer meaning. Food and drink were not mere sensual gratifications, but divine gifts, as they are in the twenty-third Psalm; and the whole material world was a symbol and sacrament of spiritual realities and blessings. Similarly the ritual of Eleusis interpreted man's common life into a wonderful world of mystic spirituality. Thus there was a great fund of spiritual insight of the finest and most beautiful sort in the very heart of that life which has thoughtlessly been adopted as the type of paganism.