But as soon as, at each stage, the work was done, and Justice, like a rock statue on whom successive generations of artists have toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she was seen not as an abstraction but as a direct revelation.

It is true that this revelation made the older symbols mean and dead, but that which overcame them seemed a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of comparison and analysis.

Antigone in the play defied in the name of Justice the command which the sceptre-bearing king had sent through the sacred person of his herald.

But Justice to her was a goddess, 'housemate of the nether gods'-- and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applauded the Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turned the gods back into abstractions.
The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spiritual supremacy to the fact that they were able to present a moral idea with intense emotional force without stiffening it into a personification; but that was because they saw it always in relation to the most personal of all gods.

Amos wrote, 'I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your assemblies....