... How is it possible to overvalue this primitive representation of
the human race in a form complete, distinct and separate, with its own
religion, stories, policy, history, arts, manners, fresh and true to the
standard of its nature, like the form of an infant from the hand of the
Creator, yet mature, full, and finished, in its own sense, after its own
laws, like some masterpiece of the sculptor's art?" The Homeric scene of
action is not Paradise, but it is just as far removed from the vices of
a later heathenism.
Mr. Gladstone compares the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," which he believed
to be the poems of one poet, Homer, with the Old Testament writings, and
observes that "Homer can never be put into competition with the
Scriptures as touching the great fundamental, invaluable code of truth
and hope;" but he shows how one may in a sense be supplementary to the
other. As regards the history of the Greek race, it is Homer that
furnishes "the point of origin from which all distances are to be
measured." He says: "The Mosaic books, and the other historical books of
the Old Testament, are not intended to present, and do not present, a
picture of human society or of our nature drawn at large. The poems of
Homer may be viewed as the complement of the earliest portion of the
sacred records.
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