Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 171

are regarded as civil. The principal aim of both is considered to be to avert evil from the existing State, to obtain material favour for it from the deities, and generally to keep it on good terms with its protectors."

As soon as we begin to understand the nature of the type of polity we are regarding, we perceive now how the almost inconceivable feeling of hatred and contempt for all outsiders springs as a matter of course from the governing principles of the social organisation. It is the distinctive product of Ancestor Worship—the idea of exclusive citizenship proceeding from community of blood by descent—which constitutes, we see, the pivot upon which turns the entire political, social, moral, and religious life of the ancient world. Throughout the history of the Greek and Roman peoples we may distinguish that there runs one leading idea. Each people, says Professor Fowler, “believed in certain great deities whom they associated with their history and their fortunes; and each looked on these deities as /ocalised in their cities, as belonging to none but themselves, and as incapable of deserting them except as a consequence of their own shortcomings.”* In all this

1 Behind the greater deities, in gradual transition from the general to the individual interest, we have a great number of others whose influence is conceived of as operating within gradually narrowing spheres. We have the deities or spirits of harvests, of seasons, of occupations, of times, of places, of minor localities, and of minor events. In these lesser conceptions also it may be observed that we are always in the presence of the fact, which is distinctive of a form of religious belief in the lower of the two categories mentioned. It is in the desire to avert evil, or to obtain aid or material advantage in the present time for those practising the prescribed rites and ceremonies of the religion, that we have the main object of its adherents.

2 The City-State of the Greeks and Romans, by W. Warde Fowler, pp.

3 4.