monotheistic monosyllable. We cannot say anything but “God” in a sentence like that of Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: “I go to die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the better way.” We can use no other word even for the best moments of Marcus Aurelius: “Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not say dear city of God?” We can use no other word in that mighty line in which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable cry of a Christian before Christ, in the untranslatable: “ O passi graviora dabit deus his quoque finem. ”
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the gods; but because it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could even Virgil have read the riddle and the paradox of that other divinity, who is both higher and nearer. For them what was truly divine was very distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their minds. It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I shall write later. Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit admission of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the mythology is like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks did not degrade it even by imaginations.