I have gathered for you
tonight only instances of what is beautiful in Greek religion; but even
in its best time there were deep corruptions in other phases of it, and
degraded forms of many of its deities, all originating in a misunderstood
worship of lower races, little less than these corrupted forms of
devotion can be found, all having a strange and dreadful consistency with
each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its strongest periods,
with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception,
passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality.
In the Psalter of St. Louis itself, half of its letters are twisted
snakes; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed in Christian
dress, or architecture, which cannot be traced back to the serpent's
coil; and there is rarely a piece of monkish decorated writing in the
world that is not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque,--
nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century
can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of bacchanalian gods.
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