L I B R_A RY 
 
 O F THE 
 
 U N I V ERS ITY 
 
 or 1 LLl N OIS
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 PLACE OF ANCIENT GREECE 
 
 PROVIDENTIAL ORDER OF THE WORLD: 
 
 DELIVEKED BEFORE THE UNIVEESIIY OF EDINBURGH, 
 ON THE THIRD OF NOVEMBER, 1865. 
 
 EIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P., 
 
 CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUEU, RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 
 AND FOREIGN ASSOCIATE OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE. 
 
 FOURTH EDITION. 
 
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 1865.
 
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 u,uc
 
 ADDRESS, 
 
 Me. Vice-chancellor, Peofessoes, and Gentlemen : 
 
 The subject on which I desire to address to 
 you my parting words, is, the place of ancient Greece 
 in the providential order of the world. 
 
 Even the pointed announcement of such a subject 
 may seem to partake of paradox. No one, indeed, 
 would think of denying that the people, who inha- 
 bited that little cluster of rugged mountains and of 
 narrow vales, played a part, and a great part, upon 
 the stage of history, and left a mark, not deep only, 
 but indelible, upon the character of the human race. 
 No one would deny that they have delivered to us bril- 
 liant examples of energy in action, and matchless pro- 
 ductions of the mind and hand, models in letters and 
 in art. Nor is there any doubt about the fact, that 
 Christian Europe has during many generations 
 assigned to Greece the largest share in the culti- 
 vation of the human mind. But this age, which 
 questions much, questions naturally enough the pro- 
 priety of the judgment, which has thus awarded her 
 the place of honour in the career of general educa- 
 tion. Her language, her history, her literature, and 
 her art, are regarded as the privileged delight and 
 separate entertainment of the few ; but there is no 
 
 B 2
 
 ( 4 ) 
 
 clear perception in the majority of minds, that all 
 these have entered deeply into the common interests 
 of mankind. Lastly, they are distinguished in so 
 broad a manner from the teaching of the Grospel, nay 
 in certain points and instances they are so much in 
 conflict with the spirit of the Evangelical code, that 
 there is a disposition to regard them as belonging 
 exclusively to the secular order, as well as to the 
 secondary, and if I may so speak ornamental, interests 
 of life. To its secondary interests, because Greece 
 does not propose to teach us how to choose a pro- 
 fession, or to make way in the world : — 
 
 " rt 8e /x' a)(p€\r)(rovcr^ o'l pvdfJ-ol Trpos Ta\(pLTa ; " * 
 
 To the secular order, because it is beyond doubt 
 that we cannot obtain from her the lessons of true 
 religion. Nay, she has sometimes almost assumed 
 the attitude of its rival ; for both the period of the 
 revival of learning, and also more modern times, 
 have supplied signal instances, in which her fascina- 
 tions have well-nigh persuaded men of genius or of 
 letters, Christian-born, to desert their allegiance to 
 their faith, and endeavour to revive for themselves, 
 at least in the region of the fancy, the worship once 
 in use at her long-abandoned shrines. 
 
 Other reasons besides these have produced a 
 practical indisposition to regard ancient Greece as 
 having had a distinct, assignable, and most important 
 place in the providential government of the world. 
 Something that may be called religionism, rather 
 
 * Aristoph. Ne^. v. G48.
 
 ( 5 ) 
 
 than religion, has led us for the most part not indeed 
 to deny in terms that God has been and is the God 
 and Father and Governor of the whole hnman race, 
 as well as of Jews and Christians, yet to think and 
 act as if His providential eye and care had been 
 confined in ancient times to the narrow valley of 
 Jerusalem, and since the Advent to the Christian 
 pale, or even to something which, enforcing some 
 yet narrower limitation at our own arbitrary will, 
 we think fit to call such. But surely He, who cared 
 for the sixscore thousand persons in ancient Nineveh 
 that could not distinguish between their right hand 
 and their left. He without whom not a sparrow falls, 
 He that shapes, in its minutest detail, even the 
 inanimate world, and clothes the lily of the field 
 with its beauty and its grace. He never forgot those 
 sheep of His in the wilderness, but as, on the one 
 hand. He solicited them, and bore witness to them of 
 Himself, by never-ceasing bounty and by the law 
 written in their hearts, so on the other hand in 
 unseen modes He used them, as He is always using 
 us, for either the willing, or if not the willing, then 
 the unconscious or unwilling, furtherance and accom- 
 plishment of His designs. The real paradox then 
 would be not to assert, but to deny or even to 
 overlook, the part which may have been assigned 
 to any race, and especially to a race of such unrivalled 
 gifts, in that great and all-embracing plan for the 
 rearing and training of the human children of our 
 Father in heaven, which we call the Providential 
 Government of the M^orld.
 
 ( 6 ) 
 
 Such preparation, ascertained and established upon 
 the sohd ground of fact, may be termed prophecy in 
 action ; and is, if possible, yet stronger for the con- 
 firmation of belief, and yet more sublime in aspect as 
 an illustration of Almighty greatness, than prophecy 
 in word. 
 
 But in this Providential government there are 
 diversities of operations. In this great house * there 
 are vessels of gold and silver, vessels of wood and earth. 
 In the sphere of common experience we see some 
 human beings live and die, and furnish by their life 
 no special lessons visible to man, but only that general 
 teaching, in elementary and simple forms, which is 
 derivable from every particle of human experience. 
 Others there have been who, from the time when 
 their young lives first, as it were, peeped over the 
 horizon, seemed at once to 
 
 " Flame in the forehead of the morning sky ;" f 
 
 whose lengthening years have been but one growing- 
 splendour, and at the last who 
 
 " leave a lofty name, 
 A light, a landmark, on the cliffs of fame." t 
 
 Now, it is not in the general, the ordinary, the 
 elementary way, but it is in a high and special sense, 
 that I claim for ancient Greece a marked, appro- 
 priated, distinctive place in the Providential order of 
 the world. And I will set about explaining what I 
 mean. 
 
 I presume that all philosophy, claiming to be 
 
 * 2 Tim. ii. 20, f Lycidas. :J: Moore,
 
 ( 7 ) 
 
 Christian, regards the history of our race, from its 
 earliest records down to the Incarnation and Advent 
 of our Lord, as a preparation for that transcendent 
 event, on which were to be hung thereafter the 
 destinies of man. 
 
 Let us, however, examine more particularly that 
 opinion which has prevailed in the world, sometimes 
 sustained by argument, oftener by sufferance, some- 
 times lurking underground, and sometimes embold- 
 ened to assert itself in the face of day, that although 
 the Divine care extends in a general way to all men, 
 yet we are to look for this preparation, at least for 
 the positive parts of it, nowhere except in the pages 
 of the Old Testament, and in the history and tradi- 
 tions of the Patriarchs and the Jews. This opinion 
 has what some of our fathers w^ould have termed " a 
 face of piety :" it has undoubtedly been held by pious 
 persons, and urged in what are termed the interests 
 of religion. But that face I am persuaded is a face 
 only, a mask which ought to be stripped off, as it 
 hides the reality from our view. 
 
 According to this theory, we are to consider the 
 line of the patriarchs and the descendants of Abra- 
 ham as exclusively the objects of any Divine dispen- 
 sation which, operating in the times before the 
 Advent, is to be reckoned as part of the preparation 
 for the great event. To them we are to look as the 
 o-uardians of all human excellence in all its infinite 
 varieties ; and when we seem to find it elsewhere, we 
 are either to treat the phenomenon as spurious, or 
 else, believing without sight, we are to consider it as
 
 ( 8 ) 
 
 derived, through some hidden channel, from the stores 
 communicated by Divine revelation to the favom^ed 
 race. This theory found perhaps its fullest, nay 
 even its most properly fanatical, development in the 
 ' Paradise Regained ' of Milton. There the works of 
 the Greek intellect and imagination are depreciated 
 in a strain of the utmost extravagance ; and, what is 
 worse, the extravagance is made to proceed from 
 those Divine lips, all whose words were weighed and 
 measured in the exactest balances and lines of truth. 
 First, the proposition is advanced by the poet that 
 divine inspiration precludes the need of any other 
 knowledge, even " though granted true : " " but 
 these," so proceeds the speech — 
 
 " But these are false, or little else but dreams, 
 Conjectures, fancies, built ou nothing firm." 
 
 The Greek philosophers are dismissed, as a body, 
 with wholesale condemnation : while Homer and 
 the tragedians are stated, with a gravity in itself 
 wonderful enough, to have learned the art of poetry 
 from tlie Jews : — 
 
 " All our law and story strewed 
 With hymns, our psalms with artful terms inscribed, 
 Our Hebrew songs and harps, in Babylon 
 That pleased so well our victors' ear, declare 
 That rather Greece from us these arts derived." 
 
 The orators are set to compete with the Hebrew 
 prophets : — 
 
 " Herein to our prophets far beneath 
 As men divinely taught, and better teaching 
 The solid rules of civil government." * 
 
 A competition this, which would probably have 
 
 * 'Paradise Eegained,' Book iv. 291, 334, 356.
 
 ( 9 ) 
 
 caused the greatest astonishment to those to whom 
 the prize in it is awarded. 
 
 It is difficult to understand how Milton's genius 
 could have prompted him thus to int against one 
 another things really, in the main, incommensurable ; 
 or how his learning, which must have made him 
 acquainted with the Grreek philosophy, could have 
 failed to impress him with the belief that men like 
 Aristotle and Plato were earnest seekers after truth. 
 
 Warburton observes upon these passages, that 
 they were in accordance with the fashion of the 
 time. And it appears that, especially in the later 
 years of Milton's life, there were a number of learned 
 men, English and foreign, such as Bochart, Huet, 
 Yoss, Gale, and Bogan, who busied themselves in 
 showing correspondences between the Hebrew and 
 the Pagan traditions, and who in some instances, 
 particularly that of Huet, Bishop of Avranches, 
 pushed their undertaking into undue and fanciful 
 detail. But I have not found that they propounded 
 any doctrine in reference to the derivation of heathen 
 literature from Jewish sources, either to the sweep- 
 ing extent, or in the cynical spirit, of the ' Paradise 
 Regained.' Their object appears to have been a 
 different one, namely, to fortify the historical credit 
 of the sacred records by tracing elsewhere matter 
 essentially corresponding with their contents ; either 
 as clothed in contemporary disguises, or as flowing 
 from a common fountain-head. 
 
 In truth, the seed-plot of this peculiar learning 
 belongs to a much earlier and a more interesting
 
 ( 10 ) 
 
 and important literature. Paganism, which had been 
 for the two greatest races of the ancient world in 
 their infancy a creed, and in their riper age a pro- 
 fession, did not, when assailed by the victorious 
 advance of Christianity, retire from the intellectual 
 battle-field without a desperate struggle, carried on 
 in its behalf with all the resources of powerful and 
 subtle intellects. As a revelation of the designs of 
 God for the recovery and moral renovation of man- 
 kind, the Gospel was not unfairly required to give 
 an account, not only of itself, but of everything else 
 in the world that preceded or opposed it. The 
 Pagan system, if it had nothing else, had at least 
 one important advantage in the controversy. It 
 represented a continuous unbroken tradition, dating 
 from beyond the memory of man : it had come down 
 from father to son through more than a hundred 
 generations with an ostensible sameness and a very 
 widely-extended sway ; and none could name the 
 day when, in the two far-famed peninsulas that had 
 given the breath of life to the ancient world, it did 
 not exist and prevail. 
 
 Under these circumstances, it was most difficult for 
 the Christian apologists to admit that there lay in 
 the old religions of the world, and particularly in the 
 Greek or the Latin mythology, any nucleus or germ 
 of the primeval truth. For the logical consequence 
 of such an admission might have seemed to be that 
 they should not sweep the old religion off the face of 
 the earth, but endeavour to reduce it to some imagined 
 standard of its purer infancy : that they should not
 
 ( 11 ) 
 
 destroy it, but reform it : whereas, on the contrary, 
 their purpose was, and could not hut be, not to 
 reform but to destroy. They met, then, the traditional 
 claims of Paganism by taking their stand upon the 
 purer, clearer, and still older tradition of the Hebrews. 
 They parried the negative value in argument of an 
 undefined antiquity with the positive record of the 
 creation of the world, and with the sublime exordium 
 of the human race, propagated in a definite line from 
 man to man, down to the firm ground of historic 
 times. So far so good. But still they were obstinately 
 confronted by a system conterminous both in space 
 and in duration with the civilised world, and able, 
 too, to say of itself, with some apparent truth, that 
 when civilisation and culture themselves began they 
 did not make or bring it, but found it on the ground 
 before them. Thus upon the merely historic field 
 the battle might have looked, to the ordinary spec- 
 tator, like a drawn one ; while it seemed needful for 
 the dignity and high origin of the new religion to 
 conquer not at one point but at all. Hence perhaps 
 the tendency of the Christian apologists, in uncon- 
 scious obedience to the exigencies of controversy, 
 after they had proved by reasoning the truth and 
 authority of the Grospel, and had smitten their enemy, 
 as they did smite him, to the dust, by their moral 
 arguments against Paganism, to accelerate its end, 
 and to demolish the very last of its seeming titles, 
 its antiquity of origin, by refusing to affiliate any 
 part or parcel of it, at any point of time, to the stock 
 of a primeval religion, and by contending that so
 
 ( 12 ) 
 
 much of truth as was scattered through tne rolls 
 of its literature had been filtered in detail through 
 successive media, from Grreece to Rome, from Egypt 
 to Greece, but was ultimately to be traced in every 
 case to the ancient people of God, and to the records 
 and traditions which had had an historical existence 
 among them. 
 
 I turn now to the remarkable work of Eusebius, 
 commonly called the ' Prasparatio Evangelica.' In 
 that work he sets forth the moral impurity, im- 
 becility, impiety, and falseness of the Pagan system. 
 He contrasts with it the marvellous prerogatives of 
 the older Scriptures. In what lies beyond this 
 province, he is not so injudicious as to depreciate 
 the intellectual development of the Hellenic race, 
 alike original and vast. But, he says they learned, 
 in its elementary form, the " superstitious error " of 
 their religion, which by their own genius they 
 afterwards recast and adorned,* from Egyptian, 
 Phosnician, and other foreign sources : but their 
 glimpses of the Godhead, and whatever they had 
 of instruction for the soul's health, they obtained, 
 by importation mediate or immediate, from the 
 Hebrews only, except in as far as it was supplied 
 them by the light of nature.^ 
 
 The question here arises, if the Hellenic race got 
 their religion from Phoenicia and Egypt, from whence 
 did Egypt and Plioenicia obtain it? And here it is 
 that we come upon the chief error into which Eusebius 
 
 * Nolo I. t Note II.
 
 ( 13 ) 
 
 was led by the controversial exigencies of his posi- 
 tion. He treats the religions of the world as having 
 been purely and wholly, even in their first beginnings, 
 errors and inventions of the human mind, without 
 any trace or manner of relationship to that Divine 
 truth which, as he truly tells us, had been imparted 
 to the Hebrews long before the days of Moses and 
 the composition of the Pentateuch. According to 
 him, the old religions were made up of worships 
 offered to the heavenly bodies, to the powers of 
 nature, to the spirits of departed men, to useful or 
 important arts and inventions, and to the demonic 
 race in its two families of the good and the evil. 
 
 He admits, in every part of his work, that he 
 appears in the arena to maintain and justify the 
 Cljristians as the authors of a schism in the religious 
 world ; and this admission it is, which, by the nature 
 of his propositions and his argument, he converts 
 into a boast. 
 
 The view taken by Eusebius was I apprehend that 
 generally taken by the Christian apologists. Saint 
 Clement of Alexandria* not only denies the origin- 
 ality of the Greeks in what they possessed of truth, 
 but treats as a theft their appropriation of Hebrew 
 ideas if and fancifully, I might say whimsically, 
 supports the charge by instances of plagiarism perpe- 
 trated by one Greek author on another. Justin 
 Martyr J allows no higher parentage to the Greek 
 mythology than the poets, who were bad enough, or, 
 
 * Strom. B. vi. p. G18, ed. Col. 1688. t Note III. 
 
 :j: Coliortatio ad Gra?cos, 43, 51, 52.
 
 ( 14 ) 
 
 still worse as he says, the philosophers. Lactantius* 
 ascribes to fallen angels, or daemons, the invention 
 of image-worship. Theophilusf affirms that the gods 
 of the heathen were dead men : Lactantius, j that they 
 were reges maximi et potentissimi. But time does not 
 permit and the argument does not require me to 
 pursue this part of the subject into greater detail.§ 
 Suffice it to say that the early Christian writers, not 
 the narrow-minded men that many take them for, did 
 not deny or disparage the intellectual prodigies of 
 the great heathen races, of those marvellous philoso- 
 phers as Eusebius often calls them, that Plato so 
 eminently commended by his intellectual debtor the 
 great Saint Augustine : || nor did they make light of 
 the voice of nature in the soul of man, nor of the 
 Divine Government over the whole world at every 
 period of its existence, nor of the truths to be found 
 in ancient writers. But the defiled and putrescent 
 system of religion which they found confronting 
 them, formidable as it was from antiquity, wide 
 extension, general consent, from the strength of habit, 
 and from the tenacious grasp of powerful interests 
 upon temporal possessions and advantages, this evil 
 system they hunted down in argument without 
 mercy, and did not admit to be an historical and 
 traditional derivation from a primeval truth, which 
 the common ancestry of the Semitic and the European 
 races had once in common enjoyed. 
 
 * Div. Inst. ii. 16. f Ad Aiitol. i, p. 75, a. 
 
 X Div. Inst. i. 8. § Note IV. 
 
 II De Civ. Dei, viii. 4, and Contra Acad. iii. 37.
 
 ( 15 ) 
 
 It can hardly be said that tliere was intentional 
 unfairness in this proceeding. The Christian writers 
 laboured under the same defect of critical knowledfrc 
 and practice with their adversaries. They took the 
 lives, deeds, and genealogies of the heathen deities, 
 just as they found them in the popular creed, for the 
 starting-points of their argument. Their immediate 
 business was to confute a false religion, and to sweep 
 from the face of the world a crying and incurable 
 moral evil : not to construct an universal philosophy 
 of the religious history of man ; for which the time 
 had not then, and perhaps has not yet, arrived. But 
 we have new sources of knowledge, new means of 
 detecting error and guiding inquiry, new points of 
 view open to us : and the more freely and faithfully 
 we use them the more we shall find cause to own, 
 with reverence and thankfulness, the depth, and 
 height, and breadth of the wisdom and goodness of 
 Ood. 
 
 Meantime, it is easy to perceive the polemical 
 advantage which the advocate of Christianity ob- 
 tained by this unsparing manner of attack. He 
 brought the case straight to issue, not between 
 differently shaded images of a Deity confessedly 
 the same, with their respective champions ready to 
 uphold their several claims amidst the din of con- 
 tending preferences and of interminable dispute, but, 
 taking his stand on the threshold of the argument, 
 and like a soldier in fight disencumbering himself 
 of all detail, between the Grod of the Hebrews on the 
 one side, worshipped from the beginning of mankind, 
 and pretended gods on the other, which could render
 
 ( 16 ) 
 
 no distinct account of their origin, and were in trutli 
 no gods at all. And, to estimate the greatness of this 
 advantage, we must take into view the nature of the 
 adverse arguments. The Pagan champions did not 
 too much embarrass themselves by defending the 
 popular forms and fables of the old religion. Perhaps, 
 to the credulous villager, the religion of Porphyry 
 might have been as unintelligible or as odious as that 
 of St. Paul. All these incumbrances were at once 
 disposed of by being treated on the Pagan side as 
 allegorical, figurative, secondary manifestations of the 
 true Deity, or even as having been in many cases 
 due to the intrusive and mischievous activity of the 
 spirits of evil. The Pagan champion, then, was him- 
 self contending, not for the forms, but for the one great 
 unseen Deity, which, driven to his shifts, he affirmed 
 to lie hid within the forms. To admit, under circum- 
 stances like these, that any principle of inward life, 
 under whatever incrustations, was latent in the my- 
 thology as it lay before their eyes, would have been 
 to betray the truth. And any seeming approach to 
 that admission, such as allowing that that foul and 
 loathsome corpse had once been alive in youthful 
 health and beauty, might have sorely hindered and 
 perplexed the Christian argument on its way to the 
 general mind. 
 
 As respects the religious ideas of the Grreeks, 
 properly so called, and their philosophic tenets, the 
 scholars of the seventeenth century seem to have 
 occupied much the same ground with Eusebius and 
 the early Christian writers. But as respected their 
 mythological personages, not having the Pagans to
 
 ( 17 ) 
 
 argue with, tliey had no prejudices against finding for 
 them a lineage in Scripture. I am not competent to 
 determine how far in the prosecution of their task 
 they went into excess. But those who admit the truth 
 of the Sacred Records, must surely decline to say that 
 they were wrong in principle. We are not called 
 upon to believe that Neptune was Japhet, or that 
 Iphigenia was Jepththa's daughter ; or that Deucalion 
 was ISToah, or that Belleroplion was really Joseph in 
 the house of Potiphar, notwithstanding certain resem- 
 blances of circumstances by which these and some 
 other such cases are marked. But if we believe in 
 the substantial soundness of the text of Scripture and 
 in the substantial truth of its history, we must then 
 also believe that the Hamitic and Japhetic races, as 
 they in their successive branches set out upon their 
 long migrations, brought with them, from the early 
 home which they had shared with the sons of Shem, 
 the common religious traditions. They could not but 
 go, as ^neas is fabled to have gone from Troy — 
 
 " Cum sociis iiatoque, Penatibus, ac naagnis Dis." * 
 
 But if there be those who would strangely forbid us 
 to appeal to what may be called, by the most modest 
 of its august titles, the oldest and most venerable 
 document of human history, the argument still remains 
 much the same. The progress of ethnological and 
 philological research still supplies us with accumu- 
 lating evidence of the chain of migrations, north and 
 westwards, of the Turanian, and especially of the Aryan 
 races, from points necessarily undefined but in close 
 
 * JRn. in. VA. 
 
 c
 
 ( 18 ) 
 
 proximity with the seats of the patriarchal nomads ; 
 and has not supphed lis with any evidence, or with 
 any presmnption whatever, that their known traditions 
 sprang from any fountainhead other than that which 
 is described in the Book of Genesis as the three- 
 branching family of Noah. If, then, npon this ground, 
 there is, to say the least, nothing to exclude or to 
 disparage, but so much to support, the doctrine of 
 the original intercommunion of these races with the 
 Semitic tribes, which could not but include religion, 
 the question recurs in all its force, how was it even 
 possible that they could leave behind them their 
 religious traditions upon the occasion of their first 
 local separation from their parent stock ? They did 
 not surely, like the souls in transmigration,* drink of 
 the river of forgetfulness, and raze out from the 
 tablets of the brain, as a preparation for their journey, 
 all they had ever known, or heard, or felt. The 
 obscuration and degeneracy of religious systems is 
 commonly indeed, a rapid, but is necessarily a gradual 
 process. Nemo repente fuit turpissimus ,* and no tribe 
 or nation passes either from light to darkness, or from 
 the possession of a religious belief to the loss of it, at 
 a moment's notice. 
 
 It was therefore antecedently probable that, in 
 examining the actual religious systems of later times, 
 and of countries at a distance from the earliest known 
 seat of mankind, but connected with it by the great 
 current of human migration, we should find remaining 
 tokens of affinity to any religious system, which upon 
 
 * Plat, cle Rep. B. x. p. 621.
 
 ( 19 ) 
 
 competent evidence we might believe to have prevailed 
 among the races most closely and directly connected 
 with that seat. And this antecedent prolmbility is 
 sustained by a mass of evidence running through the 
 whole web of the Hellenic mythology, obscure indeed 
 in its latest and most darkened ages, but continually 
 gaining in force and clearness as we ascend the stream 
 of time, and so strong in itself as to be, I am firmly 
 persuaded, incapable of argumentative confutation. 
 
 To collect and present this mass of evidence, with 
 a careful and strict appreciation of the respective 
 value of its parts, is a work not to be attempted 
 within the limits, however extended by your indul- 
 gence, of what is termed an Address. But I will 
 now endeavour to bring to a head what has been 
 stated, and to apply it to the purpose which I 
 announced at the commencement. 
 
 I submit then to you, that the true Prmparatio 
 Evangelica, or the rearing and training of mankind 
 for the Gospel, was not confined to that eminent and 
 conspicuous part of it, which is represented by the 
 dispensations given to the Patriarchs and the Jews, 
 but extends likewise to other fields of human history 
 and experience; among which, in modes, and in 
 degrees, varyingly perceptible to us, the Almighty 
 distributed the operations preliminary and introduc- 
 tory to His one great, surpassing, and central design 
 for the recovery and happiness of mankind. So that, 
 in their several spheres, some positive, some negative, 
 some spiritual, some secular, with a partial conscious- 
 ness, or with an absolute unconsciousness, all were 
 
 c 2
 
 ( 20 ) 
 
 co-operators in working out His will ; under a guidance 
 strong, and subtle, and the more sublime, perhaps, in 
 proportion as it was the less sensible. 
 
 In the body of those traditions of primitive religion 
 which are handed down to us in the Book of Genesis, 
 and which I shall make no further apology for treat- 
 ing as records of great historic weight, there was 
 manifestly included what I may term an humanistic 
 element. It was embodied in the few but pregnant 
 words which declared that the seed of the woman 
 should bruise the serpent's head.* The principle of 
 evil was to receive a deadly shock in its vital part, 
 and this at the hands of One who should be born 
 into the very race that He would come to deliver. 
 
 The next observation I would submit is this : that 
 there was no provision made, so far as we are aware, 
 at any rate in the Mosaic system, for keeping alive 
 this particular element of the original traditions, 
 otherwise than as an anticipation reaching into the 
 far distant future. On the contrary, every pre- 
 caution was apparently taken to prevent any human 
 being, or any human form, from becoming the object 
 of a religious reverence. To this aim the abstraction 
 of ttie body of Moses f from the view of the people 
 seems to be most naturally referred : and the strin- 
 gent prohibitions of the Second Commandment of the 
 Decalogue appear to liave been especially pointed 
 against the execution by human hands of the figure 
 of a man. For we hear in Holy Writ of the serpent J 
 
 * Gen. iii, 15. f Deut. sxxiv. 5, 6. 
 
 •J: Num. xxi. 8, 9 ; John iii. 14.
 
 ( 21 ) 
 
 made by Moses and exhibited to the nation : and the 
 brazen sea of the Temple * rested npon twelve brazen 
 oxen. There were cherubim in the Ark framed by 
 Moses ;f and "cherubim of image-work" were made 
 by Solomon for the Temple :| but they were not, it 
 is commonly believed, in human figure : and the four 
 living creatures of the vision of Ezekiel had each the 
 mixed character of man, lion, ox, and eagle.§ 
 
 And it would appear, that these measures were 
 effectual. Ready as were the Jews to worship the 
 serpent or the golden calf, their idolatry never was 
 anthropomorphic. The majesty of the Deity was thus 
 kept, in the belief of the Hebrew race, effectually 
 apart from that one form of lowering association, 
 which, as we see from the experience of Paganism, 
 was by far the subtlest, the most attractive, and the 
 most enchaining. A pure Theistic system was main- 
 tained : a redemption to come was embraced in faith : 
 and, in a religion laden with ritual, and charged with 
 symbol, no rite, no symbol, was permitted to exhibit 
 to the senses, and through the senses to the mind, of 
 the people, the form of Him that was to be the worker 
 of the great deliverance. Thus was kept vacant until 
 the appointed time, in the general belief as well as in 
 the scheme or theory of religion, the sublime and soli- 
 tary place which the Redeemer of the world was to fill. 
 Counterfeits there were, but they had not that dan- 
 gerous resemblance to the truth, which would enable 
 them to make head against the Messiah when He 
 
 * 2 Chron. iv. 2-5. t Exod. xxv. 17. X 2 Chron. iii. 10. 
 
 § Ezek. i. 5-10.
 
 ( ^^ ) 
 
 should arrive. And so, after He had come, His only 
 rivals and competitors in Judaea v^ere conceptions, 
 distorted in the abstract, of His character and office ; 
 far different from those solid formations of an embo- 
 died and organised religion, whose dangerous contact 
 the Gospel had not to encounter, until the life and 
 work of its author, and the foundation of the Christian 
 society with all its essential powers, were complete. 
 
 Let us now turn to the religion of the Hellenic 
 race ; and we shall find that, as matter of fact, it 
 appropriated to itself, and was intensely permeated 
 by, that very anthropomorphic * element which the 
 Mosaic system was so especially framed to exclude, 
 and to which the other religions of antiquity gave, 
 in comparison, but a doubtful and secondary place. 
 
 If I am asked to point out a link which espe- 
 cially associates the early Greek mythology with 
 the humanistic element of primitive tradition, I ven- 
 ture to name the character of Apollo as pre-eminently 
 supplying such a link. He is born of Zeus, but he is 
 not born of Here. Through him the divine counsels 
 are revealed to the world as the God of prophecy and 
 of oracle. This lamp of knowledge, burning in him, 
 establishes an affinity between him and the sun ; but 
 the anthropomorphic energy of the religion is jealous 
 of the absorption of Deity into mere nature-power. 
 At what period the identification of Apollo with the 
 sun took place in the Hellenic system, we cannot say ; 
 but this we know, that it had not taken place in the 
 
 * Note V.
 
 ( 23 ) 
 
 time of Homer, with whom Apollo and the Sun are 
 perfectly distinct individuals. To him is assigned 
 the healing art, and the general office of deliverance. 
 To him again, who remains to the last the perfect 
 model of heavenly beauty in the human male form, is 
 assigned by tradition the conquest alike over Death 
 and over the might of the rebellious spirits. In his 
 hands we find numerous functions of such rank and 
 such range, that we cannot understand how they 
 could pass to him from Zeus the supreme deity, until 
 we remember that they are the very functions assigned 
 by a more real and higher system to the Son of God ; 
 the true Instructor, Healer, Deliverer, Judge, and 
 Conqueror of Death, in whom the power and majesty 
 of the Grodhead were set forth to the world.* 
 
 The character of this deity, whom Eusebius calls 
 " the most venerable and the wisest" f of the whole 
 Olympian order, affords, in my opinion, the most 
 complete and varied proof of the traditional relation- 
 ship to which I now refer. Abundant evidence, 
 however, of the same character, might be adduced 
 under many other heads. But I do not refer to this 
 weighty subject at present with a view of leading you 
 to affirm the existence of such a relationship: that 
 could not legitimately be done, except upon a scrutiny, 
 both deliberate and minute, of a great mass of evi- 
 dence, gathered from many quarters, and dependent 
 for much of its force upon careful comparison and 
 juxta-position. I now advert to the question only as 
 
 * Note VI. t Prfep. Evang. iv. 17.
 
 ( 24 ) 
 
 casting light upon matter which will follow. What 
 I take, however, to be indisputable, apart from all 
 theorising upon causes, is this fact — that the Hellenic 
 mythology is charged throughout with the humanistic 
 element, in a manner clearly and broadly separating 
 it from the other religions of the ancient world. It 
 has anthropomorphism for the soul and centre of 
 all that is distinctive in it ; and that peculiar quality 
 seems to enter, more or less, into the religion of other 
 tribes nearly in proportion as they were related to the 
 Hellenic race. 
 
 Let us now shortly contemplate that mythology, 
 such as it appears in the works [of Homer, its prime 
 and most conspicuous author, and himself the true 
 representative of the purely Hellenic spirit in its 
 largest and most authentic form. 
 
 The theology of Homer is variously composed. He 
 seems to have lived at the critical moment in the 
 history of the Hellenic, or, as they were then called, 
 Achaian families or tribes, when the different ethnical 
 elements or factors with which they were to assi- 
 milate — Pelasgic, Ionian, Egyptian, Phoenician, and 
 the like — settled down and compounded themselves 
 into the firmly-knit and sharply-defined character of 
 a people, and they were no longer a chaotic assem- 
 blage of unassorted or even conflicting units, but as a 
 people were born into that world on whose fortunes 
 they were to exercise an influence almost immea- 
 surable. 
 
 The theology of Homer is the Olympian system ; 
 and that system exhibits a kind of royal or palace-life
 
 ( 25 ) 
 
 of man,* but on the one hand more splendid and 
 powerful, on the other more intense and free. It is a 
 wonderful and a gorgeous creation. It is eminently 
 in accordance with the signification of that English 
 epithet — rather a favourite apparently with our old 
 writers — the epithet jov{al,'\ which is derived from the 
 Latin name of its head. It is a life of all the plea- 
 sures of mind and body, of banquet and of revel, 
 of music and of song ; a life in which solemn gran- 
 deur alternates with jest and gibe ; a life of childish 
 wilfulness and fretfulness, combined with serious, 
 manly, and imperial cares ; for the Olympus of 
 Homer has at least this one recommendation to esteem, 
 — that it is not peopled with the merely lazy and 
 selfish gods of Epicurus, but its inhabitants busily 
 deliberate on the government of man, and in their 
 debates the cause of justice wins. I do not now, 
 however, discuss the moral titles of the Olympian 
 scheme ; what I dwell upon is, its intense humanity, 
 alike in its greatness and its littleness, its glory and 
 its shame. 
 
 As the cares and joys of human life, so the structure 
 of society below is reflected, by the wayward wit of 
 man, on heaven above. Though the names and 
 fundamental traditions of the several deities were 
 wholly or in great part imported from abroad, their 
 characters, relations, and attributes passed under a 
 Hellenising process, which gradually marked off for 
 them special provinces and functions, according to 
 laws which appear to have been mainly original and 
 
 * Grote's ' History of Greece,' vol. i. pp. 4 seqq. and 462 scqq. 
 t Note VII.
 
 ( 26 ) 
 
 indigenous, and to have been taken by analogy from 
 the division of labour in political society. As early 
 as in Homer, while the prerogatives of Apollo and 
 Athene are almost universal, yet the Olympian society 
 has its complement of officers and servants with their 
 proper functions. Hephaistos moulds the twenty 
 golden thrones which move automatically to form the 
 circle of the council of the gods ; and builds for each 
 of his brother deities their separate palaces in the deep- 
 folded recesses of the mighty mountain. Music and 
 song are supplied by Apollo and the Muses: Gany- 
 mede and Hebe are the cup-bearers : Hermes and Iris 
 are the messengers : while Themis, in whom is imper- 
 sonated the idea of deliberation and of relative rights, 
 is the summoner of the KaraK\f}aia^ or Great As- 
 sembly of the Twentieth Iliad, when the great issue of 
 the war is to be determined. Nothing nearer this on 
 earth has perhaps been bodied forth by the imagina- 
 tion of later poets than the scene, in which Schiller 
 has described the coronation of Eodolph of Hapsburg, 
 with the Electors of the Empire discharging their 
 several offices around him : I quote from the only 
 translation within my reach : — 
 
 " The ancient hall of Ais was bright : 
 
 The coronation-hoard beside 
 Sate king Rodolph's anointed might, 
 
 In Kaiser's pomp and pride : 
 His meat was served by the Palatine, 
 Bohemia poured the sparkling wine ; 
 
 The seven Electors every one 
 Stood, fast about the wide-woiid's king, 
 Each his high function following, 
 
 Like the planets round the sun," 
 
 * NoteVIIL
 
 ( 27 ) 
 
 But a still deeper trace of humanitarianism lay in 
 the transportation of the family order into heaven. 
 Only the faintest rudiment of such a system could 
 have been drawn from Semitic sources ; but it was 
 carried by the Hellenes to its furthest consequences, 
 and used for the basis of their supernatural structure. 
 The old Pelasgian deities of the country, the impor- 
 tations from Thrace, Phoenicia, Egypt, or elsewhere, 
 and the traditions proper to the Hellenic tribes them- 
 selves, were all marshalled and adjusted in a scheme 
 formed according to the domestic relations familiar 
 to us on eartli. The Nature-powers of the older 
 worship received the honorary distinction of being 
 made parents and grand or great-grand sires to the 
 ruling dynasty ; but, while thus tricked out with 
 barren dignity, they were deprived of all active 
 functions, and relegated into practical insignificance. 
 Still the very arrangements, which are anomalous in 
 the abstract, testify to the strength of that anthro- 
 pomorphic principle, to which they owed their recog- 
 nition. For the elder deities were not the more 
 powerful ; and parents were supplanted by their sons. 
 Oceanus the sire of the w^hole family, and Tethys 
 their mother, have for practical purposes no power 
 or place in the Olympian system. They exercise no 
 influence whatever on the life or destinies of man. 
 As the mere representations of certain physical 
 forces, they were ejected from their old supremacy 
 by the more aspiring and truer tendencies of the 
 first Hellenic creed ; but that same creed, still cojDy- 
 ing earth in heaven, found for them a place, as the
 
 ( 28 ) 
 
 decrepit and superannuated members of the system, 
 who had passed from the exercise of sovereignty into 
 retirement, Hke Laertes * on his rural farm in Ithaca. 
 More or less of the same domestic structure is ascribed 
 without doubt to the theogonies of some other 
 countries ; but our accounts of them may have been 
 influenced by G-reek sympathies, and besides I am 
 not aware that in any of them the domestic theory 
 was worked out with the same genial feeling, and 
 almost universal consistency. 
 
 In one respect indeed, at the least, there was a 
 conflict of contending sentiments. The early Hellenes 
 seem to have had a peculiar horror of incestuous 
 connection. But the notion of unity of descent 
 among the gods excluded the possibility of arranging 
 them in the family order except by nuptial relation- 
 ships which, upon earth and for themselves, Greeks 
 would have abhorred. The strong repugnance gave 
 way under the bidding of a necessity yet stronger : 
 their profound sense of the natural order was less 
 disturbed by having Zeus a polygamist, with his sister 
 for his principal wife, than it would have been by 
 abandoning that scheme of propagation from parent 
 to child upon which the whole Olympian hierarchy 
 was arranged. The acknowledgment of what was 
 forbidden on earth as established in heaven repre- 
 sents, in all likelihood, the concessions which were 
 necessary in order to prevent a breach in the frame- 
 work of the popular creed, and to weld into one 
 system elements that belonged to many. 
 
 * Odyss. xxiv,, 205 seqq.
 
 ( 29 ) 
 
 The materials for tlie old religions, outside of 
 Greece and the Greek races, were in great part 
 afforded first by the worship of nature, and secondly 
 by the worship of animals. Both of these the early 
 Hellenic system steadily rejected and eschewed ; and 
 their religion took its stand upon the idea, which 
 insej)arably incorporated deity in the matchless human 
 form. This, and much besides, obscured in the later 
 and more mixed traditions, stands out clearly in the 
 earliest records of the Greeks. The ' Theogony ' of 
 Hesiod, which must be regarded as a work of very 
 great antiquity, exhibits to us the elemental and the 
 Olympian gods in groups clearly enough distin- 
 guished. The poems of Homer, far more Hellenic in 
 their spirit, may be said to exclude and repel from the 
 sacred precinct alike the heavenly bodies and the 
 elemental powers. The plague in the first Iliad 
 bears evident marks of solar agency : but, without the 
 least allusion to that luminary, it is ascribed to A]do11o 
 in one of the noblest anthropomorphic passages of the 
 poems. The Sun * only once appears as a person in 
 the Iliad, when he reluctantly obeys the command of 
 Here that by setting he shall end the day, which was 
 the last day of Trojan success ; thus indicating the side 
 to which, as an elemental deity, he inclined. Again, 
 Xanthos, a river god, appears in the Theomachy: 
 but he appears on the side of Troy ; and he seems 
 probably to have had one name as a deity with the 
 Trojans,! another with the Greeks or Achaians as a 
 
 * Note IX. t Note X.
 
 ( 30 ) 
 
 stream. When Agamemnon offers solemn sacrifice 
 for his army only, he invokes Zeus alone, and 
 invokes him as dwelling in the sky.* But when he 
 offers the joint sacrifice of the two parties in the 
 Third Book, then he invokes Zeus as governing from 
 the hill of Ida, which was in his view, and invokes 
 with him the Sun, the Earth, and the Eivers.f The 
 Rivers are summoned to the Olympian assembly of 
 the Twentieth Book ; but it is an assembly in which 
 the gods are to take their several sides. It is a mis- 
 take to suppose that Poseidon was an elemental god -, 
 he was the patron of the sea, as he was of the horse, 
 but he was more the god of navigation than of water. 
 The sea had its elemental god, the hoary Nereus, with 
 Amphitrite seemingly for his wife ; but Amphitrite 
 is always the moaning Amphitrite, and Nereus never 
 emerges from the depths ; nor, though he is fre- 
 quently referred to, is he ever named on the Hellenic 
 page of Homer. J I turn to another head. 
 
 Loath on the one side to admit the imposing ele- 
 ments of Nature-worship on the grand scale, the 
 Olympian system is yet more alien to the other 
 favourite form of religious illusion, the worship offered 
 to animals, and particularly to the ox ; of which 
 Egypt seems to have been the head-quarters. In the 
 full exhibition, which the poems of Homer afford us, 
 of the religion in its earlier forms, there is not a trace 
 of animal worship. In the Odyssey, indeed, an awful 
 and mystic sacredness attaches to the Oxen of the 
 
 * II. ii. 412. t II. iii. % Note XI.
 
 ( 31 ) 
 
 Sun. In the island of Thrinakie, detained by ad- 
 verse winds, the companions of Odysseus are warned 
 that under no extremity should they supply their 
 wants by the destruction of these animals. Accord- 
 ingly they resort to birds and fish, miusual food with 
 the Homeric G-reeks ; they finally put some of the 
 animals to death, only to avoid dying themselves 
 by famine; and for this offence the entire crew, 
 except Odysseus, who had not shared in it, are 
 drowned when next they take to sea. Now, although 
 there is no animal worship here, there is what may 
 be called animal sanctity ; but it is in connection 
 with a deity not even recognised at the time in the 
 Hellenic system ; and introduced as it is during the 
 voyage in remote parts, which must have been based 
 u^Don the tales of Phoenician mariners, it appears cer- 
 tainly to belong to the Phoenician circle of mythology. 
 And here we find an example of the manner in 
 which the immense plastic power of the Hellenic 
 mind dealt with foreign ideas of all kinds, so as to 
 make them its own. What their sculptors did with 
 the rude and formless art of Egypt, what their philo- 
 sophers did with the shreds of Eastern knowledge 
 picked up on their travels, their theology did with 
 the many and crude varieties of superstition, which 
 flowed in upon them from the numerous quarters 
 that furnished by sea and land immigrants for the 
 Hellenic peninsula. The old Pelasgian gods, not 
 rudely overthrown, but gently taken from their 
 pedestals, were set down harmless in the shade of a 
 mellow distance ; and the animals, before which lower
 
 ( 32 ) 
 
 types of men were content to bow down the godlike 
 head, were not, when the traditions that deified them 
 set foot on Grecian soil, thrust wholly out of view ; 
 but they were put into appropriate and always se- 
 condary places. The eagle of Zeus, the falcon of 
 Apollo, the peacock of Here, the owl of Pallas, stood 
 no higher in Glreece than as accessories to the figures 
 on which they attend. 
 
 In the scheme of Homer, not all even of these are 
 found. And while in Homer we should look in vain 
 for anything beyond the faintest and most ambiguous 
 trace of a connection between Apollo and the wolf, 
 we find that connection full-blown in the Egyptian 
 mythology, as it is reported by Diodorus, where 
 Horos, his counterpart in the system of that country, 
 is rescued from death by Osiris in the form of that 
 animal ; and on the other hand, the later Greek tra- 
 dition, more deeply charged with foreign elements, 
 abounds with traditions of the wolf,* which in Athens 
 was the protective emblem of the courts of justice. 
 But, even thus far down the stream, the rule seems to 
 hold, that when the figures of the brute creation are 
 allowed to appear in the Hellenic system, they seem 
 to be reduced to subordinate and secondary uses. 
 
 Saint Clement, indeed, charges f upon the Greeks 
 certain instances both of nature-worship and of the 
 worship of animals ; but in a manner, and with par- 
 ticulars, which show how slight and local were the 
 instances of either. It will not be expected that in 
 
 * Miiller's ' Dorians,' i. 273, 32;"). (Tufnell and Lewis's translation.) 
 t S. Clem. A<lmonitio ad Gentes, p. IG, B.
 
 ( 33 ) 
 
 an Address of this nature I should attempt those minuter 
 shadings, which general statements like the foregoing 
 must require in order to perfect accuracy. Besides, 
 a common substratum of ideas runs through the mass 
 of the old religions of the world : but we trace the 
 genius of each nation, and it may be the Providential 
 purpose for which that genius was imparted, in its 
 distinctive mode of handling the common stock, here 
 enlarging, there contracting, here elevating, there 
 depressing, so as to produce a distinctive and charac- 
 teristic result. 
 
 And now I will endeavour to point out, in rude 
 and rapid outline, some of the remarkable results of 
 this idee mere of the Greek religion, the annexation 
 of manhood to deity, and the reciprocal incorporation 
 of deity into manhood : which made the human form 
 the link between the visible and the invisible worlds, 
 the meeting-point of earth and heaven. And here 
 my object will be only to give you a sample of the 
 redundant materials which seem to rise up around 
 me thickly piled on every side ; most of all, perhaps, 
 in the Homeric or Achaian period. 
 
 First I will remark a profound reverence for human 
 life and human nature, which even the fiercest 
 passions of war would but rarely, and only for a 
 moment, violate. Hence we find the highest refine- 
 ments of feeling which belong to the gentleman, exist- 
 ing at a time, when, among the Greeks, the material 
 appliances of civilisation were in their infancy, and 
 when writing and the alphabet were practically un- 
 known. The sentiment of honour is indicated, at 
 
 D
 
 ( 34 ) 
 
 this epoch, by a word (at'8w?) too delicate for our 
 rendering by a single term in the English, perhaps 
 in any modern tongue. A catalogue of horrors that 
 have stained the life of man elsewhere, sometimes 
 even in the midst of the triumphs of culture and 
 refinement, were unknown to the Achaian period. 
 I will dwell for a moment on one of these, the 
 practice of human sacrifice. 
 
 You will find* from a charming volume, the 
 Miscellanies of Lord Stanhope, that a few years ago, 
 some of the most famous men of our day were 
 brought by him into correspondence on the interest- 
 ing, but to many startling, question whether human 
 sacrifices were in use among the Romans : not the 
 unlettered semi-barbarians of Eomulus or Tarquin, 
 but the Romans of Rome in its highest political 
 power and its palmiest civilisation. Naturally 
 enough, a considerable repugnance was manifested 
 to entertaining this supposition : but as the inquiry 
 proceeded, a younger yet profoundly learned scholar. 
 Sir John Acton, was brought into the field. His 
 full and varied researches do not appear in the 
 pages of Lord Stanhope. But they range well nigh 
 over all space and time. His conclusions are that 
 *' we find traces of it, that is of human sacrifice, 
 "throughout almost the whole Hellenic world, in the 
 " cultus of almost every god, and in all periods of their 
 " independent history." | That among the Romans it 
 was still more rife : and that, though attempts were 
 
 * Stanhope's ' Miscellanies,' p. 112, t Acton, p. 19.
 
 ( 35 ) 
 
 made to restrain or put down the practice, even the 
 famous edict of Adrian, to which Eusebiiis allows 
 the honour of its extinction, failed to effect it : nay, 
 more, that " in every generation of the four centuries, 
 " from the fall of the Republic to the establishment of 
 " Christianity, human victims were sacrificed by the 
 " Emperors " themselves. 
 
 The conclusions of Sir John Acton are not admitted 
 in their full breadth by other great authorities ;* but 
 it seems impossible to doubt the wide-spread and 
 long-continued, or often recurring prevalence of the 
 practice, in contact, more or less, with civilised times 
 and nations, and sustained in various degrees by per- 
 verse but accepted ideas of religion. 
 
 Notwithstanding this terrible and too well sus- 
 tained indictment against the imenlightened and the 
 enlightened world, it is pleasing to observe that this 
 horrible rite did not originally belong to the usages 
 of G-reece. It seems to have come in by a late 
 contagion from abroad : and human sacrifice is not 
 found in Homer. The slaughter of some Trojan 
 youths by Achilles, in his im sated vengeance, has 
 none of the marks of a religious rite, and no relation 
 to a deity. Of the tradition of Iphigenia, sacrificed 
 in Aulis for the welfare of the Achaian host. Homer 
 is wholly ignorant : and Agamemnon in the IHad 
 speaks of his daughters as open to the option of 
 Achilles, as many fathers may since have done who 
 had two or three of them ready tc marry, but so as 
 
 * Milm.an's 'Tlist. of Clirist.,' i. ^ 27, Ut. edition. 
 
 D 2
 
 ( 36 ) 
 
 almost to supply sufficient evidence that no such 
 blood-stained gap had been made in the circle of his 
 family. It is many centuries later, when the tradition 
 reaches us in the works of the tragedians. In that 
 grandest of all Greek dramas, the ' Agamemnon ' of 
 jJEschylus, his murderous wife Clytemnestra seeks 
 an apology for her act partly in the immolation of 
 Iphigenia by her father's hand : and the tone of the 
 play is so condemnatory as to suggest that an 
 Athenian audience, of the middle of the fifth century 
 before Christ, did not allow religion to be an adequate 
 apology for the deed. 
 
 At a somewhat later period, the ' Iphigenia in 
 Tauris' of Euripides supplies us with more direct 
 evidence that the practice, while not indigenous in 
 Greece, was foully rife among other races. The 
 scene is laid abroad in barbaric territory : and the 
 chorus of Greek attendants on the doomed Princess, 
 addressing the Deity, says, "Receive, venerable 
 one, this sacrifice, if it be a sacrifice agreeable to 
 thee, which the law of us Greeks declares to be 
 unholy." Thus showing that the tradition of the 
 foreign origin of the abominable rite, and the original 
 freedom of the Hellenic system from it, was cherished 
 in the memory of the people. 
 
 I have already had to observe that the Achaians 
 eschewed both incest and polygamy. I may add that 
 even the unconscious incest of Oedipus and Jocasta 
 drexr down the heaviest calamities : and further that 
 we have no trace, among the Homeric records, not 
 only of cannibalism but of violence to nature in any
 
 ( 37 ) 
 
 form, as existing among the Greeks. The crimes of 
 abortion and the exposure of infants, authorised and 
 commended by Plato in his ideal State,* have no 
 place in the Homeric poems : nor do they afford the 
 slightest indication of those shameless lusts, which 
 formed the incredible and indelible disgrace f of 
 G-reece in the time of its consummate supremacy in 
 Art, and at the climax of its boasted civilisation. 
 
 If I am right in my estimate of the place which 
 the human form held in its relation to the Hellenic 
 religion, we may naturally expect to find it attested, 
 among other ways, by the following signs : — an in- 
 tense admiration of personal beauty : J a resentment 
 against and avoidance of deformity, as a kind of sin 
 against the law of nature : and a marked disposition 
 to associate ignorance with vice. 
 
 I cannot now undertake to exhibit the remarkable 
 manner in which these anticipations are realised in 
 Homer : whose appreciation of the beauty of the 
 human form appears from unequivocal signs to 
 exceed that of any author in any age or country : 
 while npon the other side, introducing but one 
 vicious character, Thersites, among the Greeks of 
 the Iliad, he describes his personal appearance with 
 a degree of detail foreign to his habit, in order, seem- 
 ingly, that, even as we read, we may see him before us 
 in his hideous deformity. The same topics might be 
 illustrated in detail from the later history of Greece, 
 in modes inconsistent or questionable enough, yet 
 
 * Plat, de Republ., B. v. § 8 seqq. p. 459. f Note XII. 
 
 t Note XIJI.
 
 ( 38 ) 
 
 abundantly significant. Courtesans of extraordinary 
 beauty were sometimes chosen to march in the pro- 
 cessions of the gods. By the side of the evil tradition 
 of Aphrodite the promiscuous, there lingered long 
 the rival tradition of an Aphrodite the heavenly. 
 On the other hand, with respect to deformity, I do 
 not remember that Aristophanes,* in his campaign 
 against Socrates, makes the use which we might have 
 expected of the ugliness of the philosopher. And 
 though jests were freely passed upon actual eccen- 
 tricity of feature, I have not seen it proved, in such 
 partial examination of the subject as has lain within 
 my power, that the G-reeks were wont to make use 
 of that which we call caricature ; which I understand 
 to be, the founding upon some known or peculiar 
 feature a representation of deformity that does not 
 exist, for the purpose of exciting ridicule or hatred. 
 Among the moderns this practice appears to have 
 been employed even to stimulate religious animosity 
 or fury : f and the rarity or absence of it, among a 
 people possessed of such high sarcastic power as the 
 G-reeks, suggests that it may have been excluded by 
 the predominating force of a traditional reverence, 
 grown into instinct, for the beauty of the human 
 form ; having its origin nowhere with greater likeli- 
 hood than in the early and continued association of 
 that form with the highest objects of religion. 
 
 I will now refer to the feeling especially of the 
 Homeric period concerning the sacredness of the human 
 
 Note XIV. 
 t Lecky's ' Else and Influence of Katioualism,' vol. ii. p. 125, &c.
 
 ( 39 ) 
 
 body against both violation and exposure. The horror 
 of Priam in anticipating his own death at the coming 
 sack of Troy rises to its cHmax, when he brings into 
 the pictm-e the tearing and defilement by dogs of his 
 own exposed and naked figm^e.* And the extremest 
 point of punishment threatened to the degraded 
 Thersites appears to be the stripping of his person 
 for the disgust and derision of the camp, and the 
 seaming it with " indecorous " wounds.f Nor was 
 this respect for decency a shallow or shortlived tra- 
 dition. It was indeed rudely tried ; since it came 
 into conflict with the eagerness of the race for high 
 physical activity and athletic development, stimulated 
 to the uttermost by the great national institution of the 
 Games, in which, as Horace said with little exagge- 
 ration, the palm of the victor uplifted even the lords 
 of earth to the honours of the gods. Yet, important 
 as it was for perfection in these unparalleled contests. 
 to free the person from the restraints of clothing, 
 Thucydides J in his Preface tells us that the athletes 
 were formerly covered: that the Lacedeemonians 
 were the first to strip in the arena, and that it was 
 not many years before his time when the fashion 
 reached its height. 
 
 But when we are seeking to ascertain the measure 
 of that conception which any given race has formed 
 of our nature, there is perhaps no single test so 
 
 * II. xxii. 66-76. 
 
 I II. ii. 261-64; aeiniaari TrXrjyrjcnv. To appreciate the force of the 
 remark, the passages should be consulted in the original. 
 
 t Thucyd. i. c. 6. See Aristoph. Ne(^, 972 seqq., on the garb of 
 youths when with their master of gymnastics.
 
 ( 40 ) 
 
 effective as the position which it assigns to woman. 
 For as the law of force is the law of the brute 
 creation, so, in proportion as he is under the yoke of 
 that law, does man approximate to the brute : and in 
 proportion, on the other hand, as he has escaped 
 from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher 
 sphere of being, and claiming relationship with deity. 
 But the emancipation and due ascendancy of woman 
 are not a mere fact : they are the emphatic assertion 
 of a principle : and that principle is the dethrone- 
 ment of the law of force, and the enthronement of 
 other and higher laws in its place, and in its despite 
 Outside the pale of Christianity, it would be difiS- 
 cult to find a parallel, in point of elevation, to the 
 Greek woman of the heroic age. Mr. Buckle * candidly 
 acknowledges that her position was then much higher 
 than it had come to be in the most civilised historic 
 period of Greece ; and yet he was a writer whose 
 bias, and the general cast of whose opinions, would 
 have disposed him to an opposite conclusion. Again : 
 if the pictures presented by the historical books of 
 the Old Testament and by Homer respectively be 
 compared, candour will claim from us a verdict in 
 favour of the position of the Greek as compared with 
 that of the Hebrew woman. Among the Jews poly- 
 gamy was permitted; to the Greeks, as has been 
 said, it was unknown. Tales like that of Amnon 
 and Tamar,f or like that of the Levite and his concu- 
 bine,J are not found even among the deeds of the 
 
 * Buckle's " Lecture on Woman," in ' Eraser's Magazine,' vol. Ivii. 
 pp. 395-6. t JiHlges xix. J 2 Sam. xiii.
 
 ( ^1 ) 
 
 dissolute Suitors of the Odyssey. Among the Jews 
 the testimony of our Lord is that because of the 
 hardness of their hearts Moses suffered them to put 
 away their wives : but that " from the beginning it 
 was not so." * Apart from the violent contingencies 
 of war, manners seem to have been, in the momentous 
 point of divorce, not very different among the Greeks 
 of the heroic age, from what they had been in " the 
 beginning." The picture of Penelope waiting for 
 her husband through the creeping course of twenty 
 years, and of Odysseus yearning in like manner for 
 his wife, is one of the most remarkable in the whole 
 history of human manners ; and it would lose little, if 
 anything, of its deeper significance and force, even 
 if we believed that the persons, whom the poet names 
 Odysseus and Penelope, have never lived. It must 
 be observed, too, what, in the mind of Homer, consti- 
 tutes the extraordinary virtue of the royal matron. 
 It is not the refusal to marry another while her 
 husband is alive, but her stubborn determination not 
 to accept the apparently certain conclusion that he 
 must have ceased to live. Not even the Suitors 
 suggest that, if he be indeed alive, any power can 
 set her free. 
 
 Scarcely less noteworthy, for the purpose of the 
 present argument, are the immunities which she 
 enjoys even in her painful position. She is impor- 
 tuned, but she is not insulted. She feels horror and 
 aversion, but she has no cause for fear. Such, in the 
 
 * St. Matt. xix. 8.
 
 ( 42 ) 
 
 morning of Greek life, was the reverence that 
 hedged a woman, as she sat alone and undefended in 
 the midst of a body of powerful and abandoned men. 
 
 Again : the famous scene of Hector and Andromache* 
 is not more touching by its immeasurable tenderness, 
 than it is important for the proof which it affords, 
 with reference to the contemporary manners, of what 
 may be called the moral equality of man and wife. 
 And the general effect of the poems is, to give an 
 idea of a social parity, and of a share borne by 
 women in the practical and responsible duties of life, 
 such as we seek in vain, notwithstanding some 
 charming specimens of character, among the Jews. 
 Still less can it be found among the Greeks of the 
 more polished ages. In their annals, we scarce ever 
 hear of a wife or mother, though the names of 
 mistresses and courtesans are entered on the roll 
 of fame, and Phrynef dedicated in a Phocian temple 
 a gilded statue of herself, which was wrought by 
 the hand of Praxiteles. Indeed, not to speak of 
 the poetry of Euripides, even the most solid and 
 impartial judgments, such as those of Thucydides 
 and Aristotle, were unfavourably warped in their 
 estimate of women. 
 
 It would, I have no doubt, be possible to illustrate 
 in great detail from ancient records the high value 
 set by the Greeks upon man, in his mind, life, and 
 person. I will mention two instances from Pau- 
 sanias. An Arcadian, named Skedasos, living at 
 
 * II. vi. 390 seqq. f Pausanias, x. c. 14, sub iin.
 
 ( 43 ) 
 
 Leuctra, had two daughters, who were violated by 
 Lacedaemonian youths. Unable to bear the shame, 
 they put an end to their lives. Their father, also, 
 having in vain sought justice from the Spartan 
 authorities, sternly recoiled from the disgrace, and 
 destroyed himself. In after times Epaminondas, about 
 to join battle with the Spartans at the place, made 
 offerings and prayers to the insulted maidens and to 
 their parent ; and then won the victory which laid 
 low the power of Sparta. 
 
 The other is of a different, and a yet more singular, 
 character. The statue of Theagenes, the Thasian 
 athlete,* after his death, fell upon an enemy of his, 
 and killed him. The sons of the man, who thus lost 
 his life, brought an action against the statue ; and it 
 was thrown into the sea, under a law of Draco, which 
 made inanimate objects punishable for destroying 
 human existence. Nor was this law peculiar to 
 Athens, where it was maintained in the legislation of 
 Solon. For, as we see, it was recognised in Thasos. 
 Now there is an apparent resemblance between this 
 law and the English law of deodand, which involved 
 the forfeiture, says Blackstone,t of "whatever per- 
 sonal chattel is the immediate cause of the death of 
 any reasonable creature." But I think that, with 
 much seeming similarity, the cases are essentially 
 different. Deodand was originally a payment to the 
 Sovereign to be applied to pious uses, and seems 
 to have passed into a manorial right, or, in the 
 
 ' Pausanias, vi. 11, 12. 
 
 t Blackstone's Commentaries, i. 8, 16.
 
 ( 44 ) 
 
 Germanic codes,* into a compensation for homicide, 
 payable to the surviving relatives. But it proceeded 
 upon the principle of making owners pay ; though 
 they paid in respect of homicide effected through a 
 material instrument. The Greek law inflicted punish- 
 ment upon the inanimate matter itself, for having 
 violated the sanctity of human life. In this essential 
 jjoint it exactly corresponded with the remarkable 
 law of Moses, which said, " If an ox gore a man that 
 " he die, the ox shall be stoned, and his flesh shall not 
 " be eaten. "f But even this provision falls greatly short 
 of the full spirit of the Greek law, since even the animal 
 that kills is conscious, and gores from excited passion. 
 
 I pass, however, to a subject of larger scope, and I 
 venture to suggest that the anthropomorphic spirit of 
 the Greek religion was the source of that excellence 
 in art, which has become to after ages a model for 
 imitation, and a tribunal without appeal. 
 
 All are aware that the Greek religion was emi- 
 nently poetical ; for it fulfilled in the most striking 
 manner that condition which poetry above all requires, 
 harmony in the relation between the worlds of soul 
 and sense. Every river, fountain, grove, and hill, 
 was associated with the heart and imagination of the 
 Greek; subject, however, always to the condition 
 that they should appear as ruled by a presiding spirit, 
 and that that spirit should be impersonated in the 
 human shape. A poetical religion must, it seems, be 
 favourable to art. The beauty of form which so much 
 
 * Grote's ' History of Greece,' ii. 10, and iii. 104. 
 t Exodus xxi. 28.
 
 ( 45 ) 
 
 abounded in the country was also favourable to art. 
 The Athenians, however, are stated not to have been 
 beautiful ; and at Sparta, where art was neglected, 
 beauty was immensely prized. And, indeed, the per- 
 sonal beauty of a race is by no means usually found 
 sufficient to produce the development of the fine arts : 
 and as to the poetry of rehgion, and its bearing upon 
 art, while a general connection may be admitted, it is 
 very difficult to define the manner and degree. The 
 practice of image-worship promotes the production of 
 works, first rude and coarse, then more or less vulgar 
 and tawdry. Over the whole continent of Europe 
 there is scarcely at this moment an object of popular 
 veneration, which is worthy to be called a work of art. 
 Of the finest remaining works of Grreek art, not very 
 many, I imagine, bear the mark of having been intended 
 for worship. The great size required for statues like 
 the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia, 
 seems unfavourable to the exhibition of fine art in 
 the highest sense.* In Pausanias we find notices of 
 an immense number of statues in and about the 
 temples : they are not commonly, I think, praised 
 for excellence in this respect ; and the mixture of 
 materials, to which we find constant reference, could 
 hardly have been chosen by the artist for the sake of 
 his own proper purpose. I have heard Lord Macaulay 
 give his opinion that this mixture in the Zeus of 
 Phidias at Olympia, made of ivory and gold, simple as 
 was that form of combination, may probably have 
 
 * Note XV.
 
 ( 46 ) 
 
 been due to the necessity of condescension to the 
 popular taste in connection with an object of worship. 
 Although, therefore, the highest artists were employed, 
 it does not appear probable that they derived any 
 part of their higher inspiration from the fervour or 
 the multitude of the worshippers in the temples. 
 Neither will it avail to urge the great esteem in which 
 the professors of the arts were held. High indeed it 
 was ; and the successions of sculptors in the different 
 schools * seem to have been recorded apparently with 
 almost as much care as the Archons of Athens, or the 
 Priestesses of Here at Argos, those landmarks of the 
 history of States. But the question recurs, was their 
 estimation the cause of their excellence, or was their 
 excellence the cause of their estimation ; and if the 
 estimation flowed from the excellence, whence came 
 the excellence itself? Both the one and the other 
 were perhaps due to another cause. 
 
 That many accessories contributed to the wonderful 
 result I do not doubt. But mainly and essentially, 
 every art and method, every device and habit, in the 
 language of Aristotle, has an end ; and is modelled 
 upon the end at which it aims ; and by that end its 
 greatness or its littleness is measured. Now the 
 climax of all art, it seems to be agreed, is the render- 
 ing of the human form. What, then, could be so 
 calculated to raise this representation to the acme of 
 its excellence, as the belief that the human form was 
 not only the tabernacle, but the original and proper 
 
 * Pausanias, in divers passages.
 
 ( 47 ) 
 
 shape, the inseparable attribute, of Deity itself? In 
 the quaint language of G-eorge Herbert, 
 
 " He that aims the moon 
 Shoots higher much, than he that means a tree." 
 
 And again as Tennyson has sung : 
 
 " It was my duty to have loved the highest : 
 We needs must love the highest when we see it. 
 Not Lancelot, nor another." * 
 
 It was this perpetual presentation of the highest to 
 the mind of the Grreek artist, that cheered him, and 
 rewarded him, and yet, while it cheered him and 
 rewarded him, still ever spurred him on in his pur- 
 suit. Whatever he had done, more remained to do, 
 
 " Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum." 
 
 The desire of ambition was fulfilled : he had always 
 more worlds to conquer. The divine was made fa- 
 miliar to him, by correspondence of shape : but on 
 the other side, its elements, which it was his business 
 to draw forth and indicate to men, reached far away 
 into the infinite. And I know not what true defini- 
 tion there is for any age or people of the highest 
 excellence in any kind, unless it be perpetual efi"ort 
 upwards in pursuit of an object higher than ourselves, 
 higher than our works, higher even than our hopes, 
 yet beckoning us on from hour to hour, and always 
 permitting us to apprehend in part. 
 
 I venture then to propound for consideration the 
 opinion, that the fundamental cause of the transcen- 
 dant excellence of the Greek artist lay in his being, 
 by his birth and the tradition of his people, as well 
 
 * Idylls of the King : Guinevere.
 
 ( 48 ) 
 
 as with every favouring accessory, both in idea and 
 in form, and in such a sense as no other artist was, 
 a worker upon deity, conceived as residing in the 
 human form. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to observe how the rich and 
 many-sided composition of the Greek mythology 
 favoured the artist in his work, by answering to the 
 many-sided development of the mind and life of man. 
 
 Unconsciously then to himself, and in a sphere of 
 almost parochial narrowness, the Greek not only 
 earned himself an immortal fame, but was equipping 
 from age to age a great School of Art, to furnish 
 principles and models made ready to the hand of 
 that purer and higher civilisation which was to be ; 
 and over the preparation of which, all the while. 
 Divine Providence was brooding, like the Spirit on 
 the face of the waters, till the fulness of time should 
 come. 
 
 But besides the Art and the Poetry of the Greeks, 
 there were other provinces in which their achieve- 
 ments were no less remarkable ; and, with reference 
 to the present argument, I must shortly touch upon 
 their philosophy. 
 
 The first philosophers of the Greek race were not 
 for the most part natives and inhabitants of Greece, 
 nor subject exclusively to Greek influences. Their 
 speculations turned mainly on the nature of the first 
 principle, and partook of an eastern spirit. But 
 when philosophy took up her abode in the country 
 where Hellenism was supreme and without a rival, 
 that human element, which lay so profoundly em-
 
 ( 49 ) 
 
 bedded in the whole constitution of the Hellenic 
 mind, unfolded itself in the region of speculative 
 thought ; and the true meaning of the famous saying 
 that Socrates called down philosophy from Heaven 
 would seem to be, that he gave expression to the 
 genius of his country by propounding, as the prime 
 subject for the study of man, the nature, constitution, 
 and destiny of man himself. And the illustrious 
 series of disciples, some of them probably greater 
 than their master, who followed his example, were 
 not therein aping or adopting the mere peculiarity 
 of an individual, but obeying a congenial impulse 
 that sprang from the depths of their being. What- 
 ever philosophy was to be indigenous in Greece 
 could not but be predominantly and profoundly 
 human ; and their power and fame, as analysts of our 
 unfathomable constitution, are fresh and unabated at 
 the present hour. Fashion may wave her wand, but 
 it is with small result. Idolatrous veneration of 
 course has at times begotten temporary reaction and 
 neglect ; but the power of Greek culture seems again 
 and again to assert itself by virtue of the law which 
 makes all things find their level, and since it came 
 into existence it has never ceased to be in the most 
 instructed periods the chief criterion and means of 
 the highest intellectual training: not, of course, 
 necessarily for each individual, but for classes and 
 for countries. 
 
 The point, however, to which I wish to draw 
 particular attention at this moment, is the large and 
 
 E
 
 ( 50 ) 
 
 well-balanced view, to which Greek Philosophy 
 attained, of the compound nature of man. 
 
 Never, probably, has there appeared upon the 
 stage of the world so remarkable an union, as in the 
 Gi-reeks, of corporal with mental excellence. From 
 the beginning of the race. Homer shared the privi- 
 lege of his most gorgeous epithet * between battle 
 and debate. The Odes of such a poet as Pindar, 
 handing onwards the tradition of the Twenty- third 
 Iliad, commemorate, so to speak, the marriage of 
 athletic exercise with the gift of Song. We do not 
 trace among the Greeks that contrast, which is found 
 so rude and sharp elsewhere, between energy in the 
 body and energy in the brain. The Greek was in 
 this respect like Adam in the noble verse of Milton, 
 
 " For contemplation he and valour form'd." 
 
 And the Greek philosophy was for nothing more 
 remarkable than the manner in which it not only 
 asserted but felt, as an elementary law, the place of 
 the Body in human education. 
 
 This was with no exclusive or peculiar view to 
 what we should call utilitarian purposes, such as 
 those of defence or industry, or even art. It seems 
 to have been rather an ample recognition of the right 
 of the body to be cared for, and to be reared in its 
 various organs up to the highest excellence it is 
 capable of attaining, as being, what indeed it is, not 
 
 * KvSuiveipa. II. i. 490 ; iv. 225, et alibi.
 
 ( 51 ) 
 
 a mere A^estiire, or tool, or appendage of the soul, but, 
 like the soul, an integral part of man himself. 
 
 This plenitude arid accuracy of view on such a 
 subject is the more to be regarded on some special 
 grounds. In general, the philosophies of the world, 
 outside of Christianity, have shown a tendency to 
 fluctuate between sensuality on the one hand, and on 
 the other a contempt and hatred of matter, and a 
 disposition to identify it with the principle of evil. 
 The philosophy of Socrates, of Plato, and of Aris- 
 totle, seems to have steered clear and safe between 
 this Scylla and this Charybdis. But again, the 
 G-reek saw, as all men see, the body parted from 
 the soul at death, and hastening rapidly, as by the 
 law of its nature, to corruption. To none could this 
 severance, and its mournful and painful incidents, be 
 more repulsive than to him, with his delicate percep- 
 tions and his lively emotions. Of a future existence 
 in any shape he usually knew or even surmised little ; 
 of the revival of the body, or of the reunion hereafter 
 of the two great factors of the human being, he had yet 
 less conception. We may say then that he lay under 
 every temptation to a disparaging view of the body 
 and of its office. Yet, in spite of his immense disad- 
 vantage, it fell to him to find a place for the body in 
 the philosophy of human nature, and to incorporate 
 the principle thus conceived in laws, usages, and insti- 
 tutions, with a clearness and general justness of view, 
 by which Christian learning has done and will yet do 
 well to profit. What with us is somewhat dubious 
 and fluctuating both in theory and in practice, with 
 
 E 2
 
 ( 52 ) 
 
 him was familiar and elementary in both; and the 
 teachers of mental accomplishment taught also the 
 science, if not the art, of bodily excellence. 
 
 Thus for example Plato, in his Treatise on the 
 State, has to consider what men are fit to be chosen 
 for rulers. They should if possible, he says, have 
 the advantage of personal beauty. They must be 
 energetic : and he therefore proceeds to treat of the 
 character of the ^f\o7roi/o9,* or diligent man. He must 
 be ready and keen in study : for human souls are 
 much more cowardly in strong studies than in exer- 
 cises of corporal strength : as in the former they bear 
 all the burden, instead of sharing it with the body. 
 But philosophy itself, he admits, has fallen into some 
 dishonour, from a tendency to partiality in handling 
 this question. The truly diligent man, then, must not 
 be halt or one-sided in his diligence. If he be fond of 
 athletic exercise and of sports, but not apt for learn- 
 ing and inquiry, then he is but half-diligent. And 
 no less " lame " will he be, says the philosopher, if, 
 addicted to mental pursuits, he neglects the training 
 of the body, and of the organs with which it is 
 endowed. This may serve for a sample, but it is a 
 sample only, of the large and complete grasp of the 
 Greek philosophy upon the nature of man : and I 
 connect this largeness and completeness with the 
 fact that the Greek, from the nature of his religion, 
 cherished in a special degree the idea of the near 
 association of human existence, in soul and body, 
 
 * Plat, de Rep. B. vii. p. 535.
 
 ( 53 ) 
 
 with that existence which we necessarily regard as the 
 largest and most complete, namely with the Divine. 
 
 It may indeed be said, that the Grreek lowered and 
 contaminated the Divine idea by weak and by vile 
 elements carried into it from the human. Yes : this 
 and much more may be said, and said with truth. 
 Nothing can be more humbling or more instructive, 
 than the total failure of the Grreek mind with all its 
 powers either to attain or even to make progress 
 towards attaining the greater ends of creation by 
 rendering man either good or happy. This is the 
 negative but most important purpose, which the 
 Greek of old may have been destined to fulfil ; 
 the purpose of casting down the strongholds of our 
 pride, by first showing us how great he is, and 
 then leaving us to see how little, when standing 
 alone, is all his greatness, if it be measured with 
 reference to its results in accomplishing those ends of 
 life, without which every other end is vain. But I 
 am not now engaged in endeavouring to ascertain 
 what Greek life or what the Greek mind was in 
 itself, and for itself; nor for what negative or 
 secondary uses the study of it may be available. I 
 wish to point out in some degree what it was for a 
 purpose beyond itself, what materials it was pre- 
 paring for our use, how it was, if I may so express 
 myself, the secular counterpart of the Gospel ; and 
 how it became, in one word, the great intellectual 
 factor of the Christian civilisation. 
 
 Now it is not I think difficult to see that materials 
 and instruments, such as it furnished, were required.
 
 ( 54 ) 
 
 I will not attempt by argument to show, that all the 
 powers and capacities of man, being the work of God, 
 must have their proper place in His designs ; and that 
 the evil in the world arises not from their use but 
 from their misuse, not from their active working each 
 according to its place in the Providential order, but 
 from their having gone astray, as the planets would 
 if the centripetal force, that controls their action, 
 were withdrawn. 
 
 We see then in the Grreeks, beyond all question, 
 these two things : first, a peculiar and powerful ele- 
 ment of anthropomorphism pervading their religion, 
 and giving it its distinctive character : secondly, a 
 remarkable fulness, largeness, subtlety, elevation, and 
 precision in their conception of human nature ; taking 
 form in, or at least accompanying, an immense vigour 
 both of speculation and of action ; a language of 
 marvellous reach, elasticity, variety, and power ; a 
 scientific excellence in art never elsewhere attained ; 
 and an eminence in the various branches of letters 
 which has given to them, for more than two thousand 
 years, the place of first authority in the cultivated 
 world. The Latin literature, though it has both a 
 character and a purpose of its own, is, in its most 
 splendid elements, derivative from the Greek. 
 
 Now, if we survey with care and candour the 
 present wealth of the world^ — I mean its wealth intel- 
 lectual, moral, and spiritual — we find that Christianity 
 has not only contributed to the patrimony of man its 
 brightest and most precious jewels, but has likewise 
 been what our Saviour pronounced it, the salt or
 
 ( 55 ) 
 
 preserving principle of all the residue, and has main- 
 tained its health, so far as it has been maintained at 
 all, against corrupting agencies. But, the salt is one 
 thing, the thing salted is another : and, as in the world 
 of nature, so in the world of mind and of human 
 action, there is much that is outside of Christianity, 
 that harmonises with it, that revolves, so to speak, 
 around it, but that did not and could not grow out of 
 it. It seems to have been for the filling up of this 
 outline, for the occupation of this broad sphere of 
 exertion and enjoyment, that the Greeks were, in 
 the counsels of Providence, ordained to labour : that so 
 the Gospel, produced in the fulness of time, after the 
 world's long gestation, might have its accomplished 
 work in rearing mankind up to his perfection, first 
 in the spiritual life, but also, and through that spi- 
 ritual life, in every form of excellence, for which 
 his varied powers and capacities have been created. 
 
 If this be so, it is quite plain that the Greeks have 
 their place in the Providential order, ay, and in the 
 Evangelical Preparation, as truly and really as the 
 children of Abraham themselves. 
 
 But indeed there is no need, in order to a due 
 appreciation of our debt to the ancient Greeks, that 
 we should either forget or disparage the function 
 which was assigned by the Almighty Father to His 
 most favoured people. Much profit, says St. Paul, 
 had the Jew in every way. He had the oracles of 
 God : he had the custody of the promises : he was the 
 steward of the great and fandamental conception of 
 the unity ul God, the sole and absolute condition under
 
 ( 56 ) 
 
 which the Divine idea could be upheld among men at 
 its just elevation. No poetry, no philosophy, no art 
 of Grreece, ever embraced, in its most soaring and 
 widest conceptions, that simple law of love towards 
 God and towards our neighbour, on which " two com- 
 " mandments hang all the law and the prophets," and 
 which supplied the moral basis of the new dispensa- 
 tion. There is one history, and that the most touching 
 and most profound of all, for which we should search 
 in vain through all the pages of the classics, — I mean 
 the history of the human soul in its relations with its 
 Maker; the history of its sin, and grief, and death, 
 and of the way of its recovery to hope and life, and to 
 enduring joy. For the exercises of strength and skill, 
 for the achievements and for the enchantments of 
 wit, of eloquence, of art, of genius, for the imperial 
 games of politics and war, let us seek them on the 
 shores of Greece. But if the first among the pro- 
 blems of life be how to establish the peace and restore 
 the bala of our inward being ; if the highest of all 
 conditions in the existence of the creature be his 
 aspect towards the God to whom he owes his being, 
 and in whose great hand he stands ; then let us make 
 our search elsewhere. All the wonders of the Greek 
 civilisation heaped together are less wonderful than 
 is the single Book of Psalms. Palestine was weak 
 and despised, always obscure, oftentimes and long 
 trodden down beneath the feet of imperious masters. 
 Greece for a thousand years, 
 
 " Confident from foreign purposes," * 
 * King John, ii. 1.
 
 ( 57 ) 
 
 repelled every invader from her shores, and, fostering 
 her strength in the keen air of freedom, she defied, 
 and at length overthrew, the mightiest of empires ; 
 and when finally she felt the resistless grasp of the 
 masters of all the world, them too, at the very moment 
 of her subjugation, she herself subdued to her litera- 
 ture, language, arts, and manners.* Palestine, in a 
 word, had no share of the glories of our race ; they 
 blaze on every page of the history of Greece with an 
 overpowering splendour. Greece had valour, policy, 
 renown, genius, wisdom, wit, — she had all, in a word, 
 that this world could give her ; but the flowers of 
 Paradise, which blossom at the best but thinly, 
 blossomed in Palestine alone. 
 
 And yet, as the lower parts of our bodily organiza- 
 tion are not less material than the higher to the 
 safety and well-being of the whole, so Christianity 
 itself was not ordained to a solitary existence in man, 
 but to find helps meet for itself in the legitimate use 
 of every faculty, and in the gradually accumulated 
 treasures of the genius, sagacity, and industry of the 
 human family. 
 
 Besides the loftiest part of the work of Providence 
 entrusted to the Hebrew race, there was other work 
 to do, and it was done elsewhere. It was requisite 
 to make ready the materials not only of a divine 
 renewal and of a moral harmony for the world, but 
 also for a thorough and searching culture of every 
 power and gift of man, in all his relations to the 
 
 * Note XVI.
 
 ( 58 ) 
 
 world and to his kind ; so as to lift up his universal 
 nature to the level upon which his relation as a 
 creature to his Creator, and as a child to his Father, 
 was ahout to be established. 
 
 And the question arises whether, among the auxi- 
 liaries required to complete the training process for 
 our race, there were not to be found some which 
 were of a quality, I will not say to act as a corrective 
 to Christianity, but to act as a corrective to the nar- 
 row views and the excesses which might follow upon 
 certain modes of conceiving and of applying it. 
 Doubtless the just idea of their general purpose is 
 that they were a collection of implements and mate- 
 rials to assist in the cultivation of tbe entire nature of 
 man, and to consecrate all his being to the glory and 
 the designs of his Maker. Yet in part they might 
 have a purpose more special still, — tlie purpose of 
 assigning due bounds to the action of impulses spring- 
 ing out of Christianity itself. 
 
 Now, that narrow conception, which I have men- 
 tioned, of the Jews as virtually the sole object of the 
 Providential designs of God, while it began doubtless 
 in a devout sentiment, passed into superstition when 
 it led men to assign to the Jewish people every ima- 
 ginable gift and accomplishment, and into virtual 
 impiety when it came to imply that the Almighty 
 had little care for the residue of His creatures. And 
 certainly it was not to Scripture itself that opinions 
 like these were due. In a Dissertation ' On the Pro- 
 phecies of the Messiah dispersed among the Heathen,' 
 Bishop Horsley has shown what a large amount of
 
 ( 59 ) 
 
 testimony is yielded by the Sacred Books to the 
 remaining knowledge of the true God among the races 
 in the neighbourhood of Judea. With them religion 
 seems to have been for long periods, as was also to no 
 small extent the religious practice of the Jews, an incon- 
 sistent combination of lingering and struggling truth 
 with rampant error. Melchisedec, the type of Christ, 
 Job, one of the chosen patrons of faith and patience, 
 were of blood foreign to the patriarchal race ; and 
 the same agency of the prophetic order, which was 
 employed to correct and guide the Jew, was not 
 withheld from his neighbours : Balaam, among the 
 Moabites, was a prophet inspired by the Most High. 
 Of the minor prophetical books of the Old Testament 
 two are expressly devoted to setting forth the burden 
 of Nineveh and the dealings of Grod with its inhabit- 
 ants : and Eastern Magi were, in the words of Bishop 
 Horsley, " the first worshi^^pers of Mary's Holy 
 Child." * 
 
 A system of religion, however absolutely perfect 
 for its purpose, however divine in its conception and 
 expression, yet of necessity becomes human too, from 
 the first moment of its contact with humanity ; from 
 the very time, that is to say, when it begins to do its 
 projoer work by laying hold upon the hearts and 
 minds of men, mingling, as the leaven in the dough, 
 with all that they contain, and unfolding and apply- 
 ing itself in the life and conduct of the individual, 
 and in the laws, institutions, and usages of society. 
 
 * 'Dissertation,' ifec, p. 117.
 
 ( <^o ) 
 
 In the building up of the human temple, the several 
 portions of the work, while sustaining and strength- 
 ening each other, confine each other also, like the 
 stones of a wall, to their proper place and office in 
 the fabric. 
 
 Divine truth contained in the Gospel, is addressed 
 to the wants and uses of a nature not simple But 
 manifold, and is manifold itself: though dependent 
 upon one principle it consists of many parts, and in 
 order to preserve reciprocally the due place and 
 balance of those parts, means that we call human are 
 available, as well as means more obviously divine ; 
 and secular forms and social influences, all adjusted by 
 one and the same Governor of the world, are made to 
 serve the purposes that have their highest expression 
 in the Kingdom of Grace. The Gospel aims not at 
 destroying this equilibrium, but at restoring it : and 
 in the restoration it accepts, nay courts, and by 
 natural law requires, the aid of secondary means. 
 
 It is manifest indeed that there was in Christianity 
 that which man might easily and innocently carry 
 into such an excess, as, though it would have ceased 
 to be Christian, would not have ceased to seem so, 
 and would under a sacred title have tended to impair 
 the healthful and complete development of his being. 
 
 Rousseau* objects to the Christian system that it 
 is opposed to social good order and prosperity, 
 because it teaches a man to regard himself as a 
 citizen of another world, and thus diverts him from 
 
 * Eousseau, ' Contiat Social,' b, iv. c. viii.
 
 ( nl ) 
 
 the performance of his duties as a member of civil 
 society. "Far from attaching the hearts of the 
 " citizens to the state, it detaches them from it, as 
 " from all other earthly things. I know nothing 
 " more opposed to the social spirit .... A society 
 " of true Christians would no longer be a society of 
 " men .... What matters it to be free or slave in 
 " this vale of misery ? The one thing needful is to 
 " go to Paradise, and submission to calamity is an 
 " additional means of getting there." 
 
 In an age and in a country such as this, it is not 
 required, it is scarcely allowable, to seem to depreciate 
 those various forms of self-restraint and self-conquest 
 which the spirit of man, vexed in its sore conflict 
 with the flesh and with the world, has in other times 
 employed to establish the supremacy of the soul, by 
 trampling upon sense and appetite and all corporal 
 existence. Even in the time of the Apostles, it seems 
 to have been manifest that a tendency to excess in 
 this direction had begun to operate in the Christian 
 Church. As time passed on, and as the spirit of the 
 unrenewed world became more rampant within the 
 sacred precinct, the reaction against it likewise 
 grew more vehement and eager. The deserts of 
 Egypt were peopled with thousands upon thousands 
 of anchorites -, * who forswore every human relation, 
 extinguished every appetite, and absorbed every 
 motive, every idea, every movement of our complex 
 nature in the great but single function of the relation 
 to the unseen world.f True and earnest in their 
 
 ♦ Note XVII. t Note XVIII.
 
 ( G2 ) 
 
 Christian warfare, they notwithstanding represent a 
 spirit of exaggeration, which it was requisite to check, 
 uprooting what they ought rather to have pruned, 
 and destroying what they ought to have chastised, 
 and mastered, and converted to purposes of good. 
 That internecine war with sin, which is of the very 
 essence of Christianity, seems to have been understood 
 by them as a war against the whole visible and 
 sensible world, against the intellectual life, against a 
 great portion of their own normal nature : and though 
 as regarded themselves, even their exaggeration was 
 pardonable and in many respects a noble error, yet 
 its unrestricted sway and extension would have left 
 man a maimed, a stunted, a distorted creature. And 
 it would have done more than this. By severing 
 the Gospel from all else that is beautiful and glorious 
 in creation, it would have exposed the spiritual 
 teacher to a resistance not only vehement but just, 
 and would have placed the kingdom of grace in per- 
 manent and hopeless discord with the kingdoms of 
 nature, reason, truth, and beauty, kingdoms estab- 
 lished by the very same Almighty Hand. 
 
 Those principles of repression, which were indis- 
 pensable as the medicine of man, were unfit for his 
 food. What was requisite, however, was not to expel 
 them, and thereby to revert to the mental riot and 
 the moral uncleanness of heathenism, but to check 
 their usurpations, and to keep them within their 
 bounds ; and this was to be effected not by prohibi- 
 tion or disparagement, but by vindicating for every 
 part, and power, and work, of human nature, and for 
 
 I
 
 ( 63 ) 
 
 every office of life, its proper place in the Divine 
 order and constitution of the world. The seed of 
 this comprehensive philosophy was supplied by the 
 words of the Apostle : " Whatsoever things are true, 
 whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are 
 just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things 
 are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report : if 
 there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think 
 on these things." * And so the solid and fruitful 
 materials of the Greek civilisation came in aid, by a 
 wise Providence, of the humanising principles and 
 precepts of the Gospel, to assist in securing a well- 
 balanced development of the powers of the Christian 
 system, and to prevent the instruments designed for 
 eradicating the seeds of disease from subverting the 
 yet higher agencies appointed for the fostering and 
 development of life in every region of our being and 
 our activity. 
 
 Volumes might be written with profit to trace the 
 application of the principles touched upon in this 
 Address to the whole history of the Church, and of 
 the Christian civilisation, down to the present day ; 
 and the more we said, the more there would remain 
 to say. That which I have now attempted is no 
 more, in effect, than a suggestion, which may open 
 the way for others into a wide and ever-widening 
 field. And if that suggestion be just it will be diffi- 
 cult to deny its importance. Let us glance in a few 
 concluding words at some of its results. 
 
 First, it places on high and safe grounds that genial 
 
 * Phil. iv. 8.
 
 ( 64 ) 
 
 primacy of the Grreeks in letters and in human cul- 
 ture, to the acknowledgment of which Christian 
 Europe has been guided not so much by a logical 
 process, or a definite forethought, as by a sure instinct 
 with the after confirmation of a long experience. 
 Nor can this primacy be justly disturbed by the mul- 
 tiplication, and the energetic and growing pursuit, of 
 those branches of knowledge for which this age has 
 been so remarkable. For Aristotle it was excusable to 
 regard the heavenly bodies as objects nobler than man. 
 But Christianity has sealed and stamped the title of 
 our race as the crown and flower of the visible creation : 
 and with this irreversible sentence in their favour, the 
 studies, well called studies of humanity, should not 
 resent nor fear, but should favour and encourage all 
 other noble research having for its object the globe 
 on which we live, the tribes with which it is peopled 
 in land, air, and sea, the powers drawn forth from 
 nature or yet latent in her unexplored recesses, or 
 the spaces of that vast system — 
 
 " Ultra flammantia ma?nia mundi," 
 
 to which our earth belongs. 
 
 But more than this : we live in times when the 
 whole nature of our relation to the unseen world is 
 widely, eagerly, and assiduously questioned. Some- 
 times we are told of general laws, so conceived as to 
 be practically independent either of a Lawgiver or a 
 Judge. Sometimes of a necessity working all things 
 to uniform results, but seeming to crush and to bury 
 under them the ruins of our will, our freedom, our
 
 ( «5 ) 
 
 personal responsibility. Sometimes of a private 
 judgment, which we are to hold upon the hard con- 
 dition of taking nothing npon trust, of passing by, 
 at the outset of our mental life, the whole preceding 
 education of the world, of owning no debt to those 
 who have gone before without a regular process of 
 proof, in a word of beginning anew each man for 
 himself: a privilege which I had thought was re- 
 stricted to the lower orders of creation, where the 
 parent infuses no prejudices into its litter or its fry. 
 Such are the fancies which go abroad. Such are the 
 clouds which career in heaven, and pass between us 
 and the sun, and make men idly think, that what 
 they see not, is not, and blot the prospects of what is 
 in so many and such true respects a happy and a 
 hopeful age. It is I think an observation of Saint 
 Augustine, that those j^eriods are critical and formi- 
 dable, when the power of putting questions runs 
 greatly in advance of the pains to answer them. 
 Such appears to be, in regard to the province of 
 the unseen, the period in which we live. And all 
 among us, who are called in any manner to move 
 in the world of thought, may well ask, who is 
 sufficient for these things? Who can with just and 
 firm hand sever the transitory from the durable, and 
 the accidental from the essential, in old opinions? 
 Who can combine, in the measures which reason 
 would prescribe, reverence and gratitude to the past 
 with a sense of the new claims, new means, new 
 duties of the present ? Who can be stout and earnest 
 to do battle for the Truth, and yet hold sacred, as he 
 
 F
 
 ( 66 ) 
 
 ought, the freedom of inquiry, and cherish, as he 
 ought, a chivalry of controversy Hke the ancient chi- 
 valry of arms ? One persuasion at least let us embrace : 
 one error let us avoid. Let us embrace this persuasion, 
 that Christianity will by her inherent resources find 
 for herself a philosophy equal to all the shifting and 
 all the growing wants of the time. Let us avoid the 
 error of seeking to cherish a Christianity of isolation. 
 The Christianity which is now and hereafter to flou- 
 rish, and, through its power in the inner circles of 
 human thought, to influence ultimately, in some 
 manner more adequate than now, the masses of man- 
 kind, must be such as of old the Wisdom of Grod was 
 described. 
 
 " For in her is an understanding spirit, holy, one 
 " only, manifold, subtil, lively, clear, undefiled, plain, 
 " not subject to hurt, loving the thing that is good, 
 " quick, which cannot be letted, ready to do good, 
 " kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having 
 " all power, overseeing all things. . . . 
 
 " For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, 
 " the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the 
 " image of His goodness." * 
 
 It must be filled full with human and genial 
 warmth, in close sympathy with every true instinct 
 and need of man, regardful of the just titles of every 
 faculty of his nature, apt to associate with and make 
 its own all, under whatever name, which goes to 
 enrich and enlarge the patrimony of the race. And 
 
 * 'Wisdom of Solomon,' viii. 22, 23, 26.
 
 ( 07 ) 
 
 therefore it is well that we should look out over the 
 field of history, and see if haply its records, the more 
 they are unfolded, do or do not yield us new materials 
 for the support of faith. Some at least among us ex- 
 perience has convinced that, just as fresh wonder and 
 confirmed conviction flow from examining the struc- 
 ture of the universe, and its countless inhahitants, and 
 their respective adaptations to the purposes of their 
 being and to the use of man, the same results will 
 flow in yet larger measure from tracing the footmarks 
 of the Most High in the seemingly bewildered j^aths 
 of human history. Everywhere, before us, and behind 
 us, and around us, and above us and beneath, we 
 shall find the Power which — 
 
 " Lives througli all life, extends through all extent, 
 Spreads undivided, operates unspent." * 
 
 And, together with the Power, we shall find the 
 Groodness and the Wisdom, of which that sublime 
 Power is but a minister. Nor can that wisdom and 
 that goodness anywhere shine forth with purer 
 splendour, than when the Divine forethought, work- 
 ing from afar, in many places, and through many 
 generations, so adjusts beforehand the acts and the 
 affairs of men, as to let them all converge upon a 
 single point, upon that redemption of the world, by 
 God made Man, in which all the rays of His glory 
 are concentrated, and from which they pour forth a 
 flood of healing light even over the darkest and 
 saddest places of creation. 
 
 Pope's ' Essay on Man,' iv. 
 
 F 2
 
 ( 68 ) 
 
 Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Professors, and Gentlemen, I 
 commend to your notice and your impartial research 
 the subject of the foregoing remarks. It is at least a 
 less unworthy offering than the mere commonplaces 
 of taking leave. Yet I claim one remaining moment 
 to convey to you my gratitude for your confidence, 
 to assure you that I shall ever feel a lively interest 
 in all that pertains to the welfare of your famous 
 University, and to bid you respectfully farewell.
 
 ( ^9 ) 
 
 NOTE S. 
 
 Note I., p. 12. 
 
 This appropriating power of tlie Greeks is well expressed in a 
 passage quoted by Eusebiiis from Diodorus, who is describing the 
 view taken of that power by the Egyptians (Prsep. Evaug. ii. 6) 
 Ka^oAoi; 8e ^acrt tovs "EXATjias e^iSta^ecr^at roiis tTrt^avecrTaTovs 
 'AiyvTTTtwi' ijpwds T€ Kol $eov<;. 
 
 Note II., p. 12. 
 
 These sentiments are not only contained in particular passages 
 of the ' Prfeparatio,' but run through the whoio v»"crk. See for 
 instance : 
 
 On the foreign origin of the Greek religion, B. i. 6, i. 10, ii. 1, 
 and ii. 3. The Hellenic ixvOoXoyiat KarwOev bpjxwvrai, iii. 4. 
 
 On the composition of the old_religions, v. 3. 
 
 On the commendation of the Greek genius and the philosophers, 
 i. 6 (to. (TCju-va r^s yevratas 'EA.XiJva)v ^iAoo"o^tas), i. 8, i. 10, xi. 1, 
 and ii. 6 (6 OavfJidaws TlXdroiv .... 6 Trdrnov apLOTO<;), V. 33. 
 
 On the light of nature, ii. 6 (c^i'o-ct koI auroStSaKrots cii'otats, 
 fxdXXov Se ^eoStSa/cTois), and elsewhere (ftvcriKol ewotai. 
 
 On the appropriations from the Hebrews, Books ix. and x. 
 
 Note III., p. 13. 
 
 Celsus appears to have used the same imputation of being copyists 
 against the Hebrews : and to have been confuted by Origen on 
 account of the greater antiquity of the Jewish histories. Stilling- 
 fleet, Orig. Sac. ch. i. (vol. i. p, 16, Oxf. ed.) 
 
 Note IV., p. 14. 
 
 Saint Augustine traced the prophecies of Christ in the Sibylline 
 Books (De Civ. Dei, B. xviii. c. 23). Like the other Chi-istian 
 apologists, he commonly treats the heathen deities as real spirits of
 
 ( 70 ) 
 
 evil. He seems, in part, like Eusebius, to resolve the personages 
 of the Greek and Koman Mythology into, 1. Men deified after 
 death, 2. Elements or Natm-e Powers, 3. Dasmones (De Civ. Dei., 
 B. xviii. c. 14). He recognises divine aid given to the philosophers 
 of Greece (de Civ. Dei, B. ii. c. 7) : and in tracing the history of 
 the two Civitates, the Coelestis, and the Terrestris, he says (B. xvi. 
 c. 10), that probably there were children of the former in the latter, 
 as well as of the latter in the former. 
 
 Note V., p. 22. 
 
 Mr. Grote remarks upon this anthropomorphic genius of the 
 Hellenic religion, mider the name of an xmiversal " tendency to 
 personification." — 'History of Greece,' i. 462. Mr. Euskin has 
 some striking observations on the same subject. 
 
 Note VI., p. 23. 
 
 Apollo. Mr. Max Miiller says, in his most able work on ' Lan- 
 .guage,' vol. ii. p. 433, that Apollo drew to himself the worship of 
 the Dorian family, Athene of the Ionian, Poseidon of the -iJEolian, 
 but that the worship of Zeus reached over all. I venture to doubt 
 the accuracy of this classification. The Greek mythology was 
 eminently favourable, as one of popular idolatry, to the develop- 
 ment of particular local worships, and the preferences were much 
 associated with race. But it would sm-prise me to see any proof 
 that the worship of Apollo, or that of Athene, was anything less 
 than universal among the Greeks. The invaluable work of Pau- 
 sanias, with its careful and patient enumerations, apj)ears to form 
 a conclusive standard of appeal on this subject. 
 
 On the character of Aj)ollo, see C. 0. Miiller's ' Dorians,' Lewis 
 and Tufifuell's translation, i. 329. 
 
 Note YII., p. 25. 
 
 The word "jovial " appears to be one of that group of words, too 
 little noticed, which have come into the English tongue direct 
 from the Italian, and to abound in our old authors. It is explained 
 by Johnson as meaning, 1. Under the influence of Jupiter, 2. Gay, 
 airy, merry. But I do not find in any of our dictionaries or word- 
 books which I have consulted any notice of what appears to be its
 
 ( 71 ) 
 
 differentia, and to make it reflect the idea of the Olympian life : 
 namely, that in its proper nse it does not mean merriment simply, 
 but an elevated or royal kind of merriment. Thus Drayton speaks 
 of the " princely jovial fowl :" and the sense is exactly touched in a 
 speech of Lear (Act iv., Scene 6) — 
 
 What ? 
 
 I will be jovial : come come, I am a I'ing, 
 
 My masters, know you tliat. 
 
 This distinctive flavour of the sense has been in part nibbed out : 
 yet jovial is not even now synonymous with merry : we should 
 more properly say jovial men, merry children, than vice versa. 
 
 Note YIIL, p. 26. 
 It is worthy of remark, that in Homer the political life of man is 
 reflected even as to some portion of its detail by the divine life. 
 The institution of the (SovXrj, or council, was already well marked 
 off from that of the ayopij, or Assembly. So the ordinary meeting 
 on Olympus seems to be the /3ov\r], but this, which precedes the 
 Theomachy, to correspond with the Assembly. 
 
 Note IX., p. 29. 
 The Sun in the ' Iliad,' see II. xviii. — 
 
 yjeXiov S' aKajjiavTa (Soanns rrorvia UpT]- 
 TTip'^ev eV ' Q.K€avoio poas cieicovTa vteadnt- 
 
 Wliy being thus passive, and scarcely animate, is the planet repre- 
 sented as unwilling ? The answer must be foimded on conjecture. 
 But I conceive it to be probably this. The Trojan worship seems 
 to have been more elemental than the Greek : so the Sun was 
 unwilling to cut short that famous day, which was to be the last 
 day of prosperity to the Trojan arms. 
 
 In the ' Odyssey ' we have no mention of the worship of the Sun 
 by the Greeks : and when Eurupulos in Thrinakie persuades his 
 companions to slay the oxen of that deity for food, he says, " when 
 we return to Ithaca, we can make him a rich temple and precinct, 
 with abundant votive gifts " (Od. xii, 346), 
 
 TTLOva vqov 
 rev^ofiev, iv he Ke Beipev ayakpiaTa naWa Kal eadXci, 
 
 thus raising the inference that he had none already existing in that 
 very small island.
 
 ( 72 ) 
 
 Note X., p. 29. 
 On the Invocation of Mivers. 
 It is probable that these may have been admitted more or less 
 into purely local worship : the old Pelasgian system could not be, 
 and as we know was not, without influence, especially apart from 
 the greater centres, upon the religion of the country. It may be 
 from this cause that Achilles in Troja not only invokes his own 
 Spercheios, but mentions his father's prayer and vow to offer 
 an hecatomb to the stream, in the place where was its glebe and 
 altar. In this class of cases, the anthropomorphic force of the 
 Greek system showed itself by investing the rivers with hmnan 
 forms. Achelous, the most famous of them, fought against Hera- 
 kles for Deianira, sought her hand, and had many other wives. 
 Odysseus invokes the river in Corfu, but then he is in the sphere of 
 the outer geography, and of a theology differing from the Greek. 
 Asteropaios, a Pseonian hero, is grandson to the Eiver Axios. My 
 conjecture respecting the significance of the dual name, Xanthus 
 and Scamandros, is only one step in advance of the most current, 
 and also conjectural, interpretation, which treats the divine name 
 as senior, the human one as more recent. 
 
 Note XI., p. 30. 
 
 The single clear trace that I remember to have perceived in 
 Homer of the elemental creed is this, that, in one single passage, 
 he calls the sacrificial fire by the name of Hephaistos, the god of 
 fire. II. ii. 426. 
 
 Note XII., p. 37. 
 
 On this subject, as a testimony instar omnium, see the passage in 
 Aristophanes Ne<^. 1087-1100. 
 
 Note XIII., p. 37. 
 
 " Philippus of Crotona was actually deified by the inhabitants of 
 Segeste, and had sacrifices offered to him in his lifetime on account 
 of his beauty. Cypselus instituted prizes for beauty : while such 
 was the honour conferred by its possession, that Elpinice, the sister 
 of Cimon, did not hesitate to sit as model to Polygnotus." — 
 Falkenor's ' Daedalus,' p. 33, note.
 
 ( 73 ) 
 
 Note XIV., p. 38. 
 On the contrary, in the Clouds, v. 540, Aristopliancs takes credit 
 to himself because his play made no jest upon baldness — 
 
 ov8' ecTKcoylre tovs (pakaKpovs, 
 
 and this is believed to be a rebuke to Eupolis for having con- 
 descended to ridicule Aristophanes himself on the score of baldness 
 (Mitchell in loc). The conclusion I have stated in the text as to 
 caricature, seems to m.e, on the whole, to be supported by the 
 collection of instances in the work of Champfleury. (' Histoire de 
 la Caricatiu'e Antique,' par Champfleuiy. Dentu, Paris.) Neither 
 do I find anything to shake this conclusion in the recent work of 
 Mr. Wright (' History of Caricature and of Grotesque in Art.' 
 London, 1865). On the use of caricature for religion, see Lecky's 
 Rationalism,' vol. ii., p. 1. 
 
 Note XV., p. 45. 
 The Zeus of Phidias at Olympia is stated to have been sixty feet 
 high, and the Athene of the Parthenon forty, — Falkener's ' Daeda- 
 lus,' p. 94. 
 
 Note XVI., p. 57. 
 
 It has been, perhaps, too little noticed that the expedition of 
 Alexander, by carrying not only the political, but especially the 
 intellectual, dominion of Greece through the East, was no less 
 signally a Preparation for the Gospel than was the growth of the 
 Roman Power, which placed the civilised world under the sway of 
 a single sceptre (S. Aug. De Civ. Dei, B. xviii. c, 22). The dis- 
 solution of Alexander's empire after his death has made us take for 
 a short-lived, meteor-like phenomenon, what really was a great work, 
 with results not less permanent than wide-spread. Its importance 
 reached a climax in the Translation of the Jewish Scriptui'es 
 executed by the Seventy, 
 
 Note XVII., p. (il. 
 Vividly described by Lecky, ' Rise and Influence of Rationalism 
 in Europe,' vol. ii. p. 28. The same princij)le runs thi'ough Church 
 History : as where the admirable Mere Marie- Angelique Arnauld 
 describes the Infirmaries in her convent as " basses et hmnides 
 comme des caves," making the nims ill, and yet " cela ne les 
 degoutoit point. Dieu nous en envoya plusieurs," (Relations du 
 Port Royal, p. 30.) 
 
 a
 
 ( 74 ) 
 
 Note XVIII., p. 61. 
 
 Saint Augustine says of the body, ad ipsam naturam Jwminis pec- 
 tinet (De Civ. Dei, i. 13). Eusebius in his account of the Hebrew 
 religion shows a tendency to depreciate this constituent part of 
 man, when he relates that they viewed it simply as a space for the 
 soul to dwell in (to hi, tovtov x'^po-^ Trept/SoXrjs lirix^Lv), and says 
 all bodily pleasures are no higher than those of the brute creation 
 (B. V. c. 4). Saint Augustine had felt deeply the influence of the 
 Greek philosophy, and hence perhaps it is that with his warmly^ 
 coloured views he combined so much breadth of conception. 
 
 LONDON ; PKINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SOKS, SIAMFOKD fcTKELI, 
 AKD CHARING CROSS.
 
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