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ORIGINAL SOURCES OF CULTURE. 9cuitous routes have left them unchanged? And is it notprobable, that the Pelasgi essentially altered them in theirown way, before delivering them to the Hellenes? Questions of this kind cannot now be answered with certainty ;but, however many of the Egyptian gods may have beenintroduced into Greece, it is certain that not all were of thatorigin.The father of history has not forgotten to remark, 1that Neptune, Juno, Bacchus, and others were not ofEgyptian origin, and this has been fully substantiated bythe acute investigationsof the modern inquirers whom wehave justcited,But to whatever country the gods of the Hellenes mayhave originally belonged, they certainly did not remain, inGreece, what they had been before.We need but throw aglance on the Grecian religion to convince ourselves, thatthe gods of the Greeks became entirely their property, ifthey were not so originally;that is,the representationswhich they made of them, were entirely different from thehave borconceptions of those nations, of whom they mayrowed them. Wherever Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, andPhoebus Apollo, may have first been worshipped, no countrybut Hellas adored the Olympian ruler of the world, thequeen of heaven, the power which encompassed the world,the far-darting god of light.And it was the same with therest.What the Grecian touched, became gold, though before it had been but a baser metal.But if the popular religionof the Greeks was formed bychanging the character of foreign gods,in what did thechange consist What ? were the characteristics of the Grecian assembly of divinities ? This question is important,not for the history of the Grecian religion alone, but for thegeneral history of religion itself. For the isproblem nothing less, than to fix on the essential difference betweenthe religion of the ancient eastern and western world.This characteristic difference may yet be easily discovered,and may be reduced, we think, to a single head.All inquiriesrelative to the divinities of the East, eventhough the explanations of individual ones may be various,lead to the general result, that objects' and powers of nature1Herod, ii, 50.