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We must get back behind these gods of the artist's workshop and the romance-maker's imagination, and see if the religious thinkers of the great period use, or imply, the same highly human conceptions. We shall find Parmenides telling us that God coincides with the universe, which is a sphere and immovable;ssss1 Heraclitus, that God is 'day night, summer winter, war peace, satiety hunger'. Xenophanes, that God is all-seeing, all-hearing, and all mind;ssss1 and as for his supposed human shape, why, if bulls and lions were to speak about God they would doubtless tell us that he was a bull or a lion.ssss1 We must notice the instinctive language of the poets, using the word θεός in many subtle senses for which our word 'God' is too stiff, too personal, and too anthropomorphic. Τό εὐτυχεῖν, 'the fact of success', is 'a god and more than a god'; τὸ γιγνώσκειν φίλους, 'the thrill of recognizing a friend' after long absence, is a 'god'; wine is a 'god' whose body is poured out in libation to gods; and in the unwritten law of the human conscience 'a great god liveth and groweth not old'.ssss1 You will say that is mere poetry or philosophy: it represents a particular theory or a particular metaphor. I think not. Language of this sort is used widely and without any explanation or apology. It was evidently understood and felt to be natural by the audience. If it is metaphorical, all metaphors have grown from the soil of current thought and normal experience. And without going into the point at length I think we may safely conclude that the soil from which such language as this grew was not any system of clear-cut personal anthropomorphic theology. No doubt any of these poets, if he had to make a picture of one of these utterly formless Gods, would have given him a human form. That was the recognized symbol, as a veiled woman is St. Gaudens's symbol for 'Grief'.