Laudator Temporis Acti

Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960), Pan and the Twins (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 232-233 (from Chapter XIII):

Yet Arcadius felt conscious of a change in Pan, and before the deity stumped off upon his night-hidden way, he spoke to him.

"How is it with you yourself, dear God?" he asked. "It has ever been the selfish mortal's custom to fling his troubles upon an immortal director and load the divine shoulders with burdens often of his own making; yet I do not stint my love, and love, being quick-sighted, perceives a change."

"It is with me as with all of us in whom mankind puts trust and faith," replied the god. "The measure of a deity's success must ever depend upon the quality of his worshippers. The breath of our celebrants and votaries is the life in our nostrils; and as that diminishes, so must we abate. Godkind are in truth solely dependent on mankind, as light is nothing without darkness, heat nothing without cold, stability no more than a word without vicissitude and change. To-day new divine figures are at the meridian of man's worship; a new evangel draws the heart and hope of humanity; a new dynasty of Heaven is to be exalted to the central throne; but the simple theology of your Christian primitives will be soon overlaid, corrupted, lost in the usual flood of myth and metaphysic. Meantime we constellations of Olympus sink to our setting under the dawn of your Triple Sun. We pass to the limbo of vanished pantheons and mythologies; we join the gods of Assyria and Persia and Egypt in their everlasting eclipse; we diminish and melt away as the snow upon Soracte, while human hope and fear, trust and affection depart from us. Some will vanish out of the heart of man for ever; while others may loiter as loved ghosts for all time. Of such am I, and my syrinx shall yet whisper by the river, my lonely altars win their worship down many an avenue of human years. For herds must roam upon the high lands, flocks silver the water meadows; and man, thinking on the mettle of his pastures, still spare a kindly thought for the Pasturer."

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.