The Sun.
London, England, 1865-11-04 00:00:00

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.

3IR. GLADSTONE'S VALEDICTORY ADDRESS AS
RECTOR.
Yesterday afternoon, at two o'clock, the Right
Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Rector of the University of
Edinburgh, delivered a valedictory address to his
constituency, the students, on the occasion of com-
pleting a second term of office. The place of meet-
ing was the Music-hall, and the admission was
almost entirely restricted to the students and gra-
duates. The hall was crowded to excess. There was a
splendid attendance of all branches of the Univer-
sity. The Court and Professors were on the plat-
form, and the students and graduates in the hall.
Mrs. and Miss Gladstone were present, and were
loudly cheered.
The Rector's reception was most enthusiastic.
The following address, notwithstanding omissions,
took two hours and a quarter in delivery :
Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Professors, 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 inhabited 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 in-
delible, 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
productions 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 cultiva-
tion of the human mind. But this age, which ques-
tions much, questions naturally enough the propriety
of the judgment which has thus awarded her the
place of honour in the career of general education.
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 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 Gospel--
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 belong-
ing exclusively to the secular order as well as to the
secondary, and, if I may so speak, ornamental inte-
rests of life. To its secondary interests, because
Greece does not propose to teach us how to choose
a profession, or to make way in the world :

"Ti Si 1.0 c'oc6eXio-ovoi .1 evopol Ts-pis racfura ;"
To the secular order, because it is beyond doubt that
we cannot obtain from her the lessons of true reli-
gion. Nay, she has sometimes almost assumed the
attitude of its rival ; for the period of the revival of
learning, and also more modern times, have supplied
signal instances in which her fascinations 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 govern-
ment of the world. Something that may be called
religionism, rather 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 human race, as well as of Jews and Chris-
tians, yet to think and act as if His providential eye
and care had been confined is 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 Ninevah 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 accomplishment 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 world. Such preparation, ascertained and
established upon the solid ground of fact, may be
termed prophecy in action ; and is, if possible, yet
stronger for the confirmation of belief, and yet
more sublime in aspect as an illustration of Almighty
greatness, than prophecy in. word. But in this pro-
vidential government there are diversities of opera-
tions. 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 teach-
ing, in elementary and simple forms, which is deriv-
able 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 ;"
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."
Now, it is not in the general, the ordinary, the ele-
mentary 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 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 tran-
scendant event on which were to be hung thereafter
the destinies of our race. Let us, however, examine
more particularly that opinion which has prevailed
in the world, sometimes sustained by argument,
oftener bysufferance, sometimes lurkingunderground,
and sometimes emboldened 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, no-
where except in the pages of the Old Testament, and
in the history and traditions and patriarchs and the
Jews. This opinion has what some of our fathers
would have termed " a face of piety ;" it has un-
doubtedly 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 con-
sider the line of the patriachs and the descendants of
Abraham as exclusively the objects of any Divine
dispensation 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
guardians of human excellence in all its infinite
varieties ; and when we seem to find it elsewhere, wo
are either to treat the phenomenon as spurious, or
else, believing without sight, we are to consider it
as derived, through some hidden channel, from the
stores communicated by Divine revelation to the
favoured 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 de-
preciated in a strain of the utmost extravagance ;
and,what is worse, the extravagance is made to pro-
ceed 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 but dreams,
Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm,"

The Greek philosophers are dismissed, as a body,
with wholesale condemnation ; while Homer and
the tragedians are stated, with a gravity irA itself

wonderful enough, to have learnt the art of poetry
from the 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
caused the greatest astonishment to those to whom
the prize in it is awarded. It is difficult to under-
stand how Milton's genius could have prompted him
thus to pit against one another things really, in the
main, incommensurable ; or how his learning, which
must have made him acquainted with Greek philo-
sophy, 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, Voss, Gale, and Bogan, who
busied themselves in showing correspondences be-
tween the Hebrew and the Pagan traditions, and
who, in some instances, particularly that of Huet,
Bisliop 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 sweeping
extent, or in the cynical spirit, of the " Paradise
Regained." Their object appears to have been a dif-
ferent 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 pectdiar learning belongs to a much
earlier and a more interesting and important litera-
ture. Paganism, which had been for the two
greatest races of the ancient world in their infancy
a creed, and in their riper age a profession, did not,
when assailed by the victorious advance of Chris-
tianity, retire from the intellectual battlefield with-
out a desperate struggle, carried on in its behalf
with all the resources of powerful and subtle intel-
lects. As a revelation of the designs of God for the
recovery and moral renovation of mankind, 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 sys-
tem, if it had nothing else, had at least one impor-
tant 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 ex-
tended 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 par-
ticularly 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 destroy it, but reform
it : whereas, on the contrary, their purpose was,
and could not but be, not to reform but to de-
stroy. 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 obsti-
nately 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
spectator 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, per-
haps, the tendency of the Christian apologists, in
unconscious obedience to the exigencies of contro-
versy, after they had proved by reasoning the truth
and authority of the Gospel, 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 prinieval religion, and by contending that
so much of truth as was scattered through the rolls
of its literature had been filtered in detail through
successive media, from Greece 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 " Prwparatio Evangelica." In that work
he sets forth the moral impurity, imbecility,
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 intel-
lectual development of the Hellenic race, alike
original and vast. But, he says, they learnt in its
elementary form the " superstitious error" of their
religion, which by their own genius they afterwards
recast and adorned from Egyptian, Phoenician, 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, ex-
ecefpntaitnuraes. farThaes
qiut
ewstaisonsuhperpeliaedristehs
if tbhyntHheellliegnhiet
frraocme
whence
tenthr religion
oeeididEgyptfraoinndPrhhcezncileaiaanebdtaEingypitt,
?
And here it is that we come upon the chief error
into which Eusebius was led by the controversial
exigencies of his position. He treats the religions of
the world as having been purely and wholly, even
to 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 de-
parted men, to useful or important arts and inven-
tions, and to the demoniac 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 Christians as the authors
of a schism in the religious world ; and this
admission it is which, by the nature of his proposi-
Ttiohnes
vainedw his arguments,
by Eusebiusguments, hecon:_earsts,
apprehend, ta
boast.
htrhisetyianpoaspsoeslosegisd apologists.
thatst . generally Clement
o f takenA lxa
Alexandria h
ria not only denies the ori-
ginality of the Greeks in lveh Christian
truth, but treats as a theft their appropriation of
Hebrew ideas ; and fancifully, I might say whim-
sically, supports the charge by instances of pla-
giarism perpetrated by one Greek author on another.
Justin Martyr allows no higher parentage to the
Greek mythology than the poets, who were bad
enough, or, still worse as he says, the philoso-
phers. Lactantius ascribes to fallen angels, or
demons, the invention of image-worship. Theo-
philus affirms that the gods of the heathen were
deadmen ;- Lactantius, that they were reges maxima
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 that many take them for, did not deny or
disparage the intellectual prodigies of the great
heathen races, of those marvellous philosophers, as
Eusebius often calls them, that Plato so eminently
commended by his intellectual debtor, the great St.
Augustine ; nor did they make light of the voice of
nature in the soul of man, nor of the Divine Go-
vernment 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, for-
midable as it was from antiquity, wide extension,
general consent, from tle strength of habit, and the
tenacious grasp of powerful interests upon tempo-
ral possessions and advantages, this evil system they
hunted down in argument without mercy, and did
not admit to be an historical and traditional deri-
vation from a primeval truth, which the common
ancestry of the Semitic and the European races had
once in common enjoyed. It can hardly be said
that there was intentional unfairness in this pro-
ceeding. The Christian writers laboured under the
same defect of critical knowlege and practice with
their adversaries. They took their 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
God. Meantime, it is easy to perceive the polemical
advantage which was obtained by this unsparing man-
ner 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 amid the din of
contending 'preferences and of interminable dispute,
but, taking his stand on the threshold of the argu-
ment, and like a soldier in fight disencumbering him-
self of all detail, between the God of the Hebrew on
the one side, worshipped from the beginning of man-
kind, and pretended gods on the other, which could
render no distinct account of their origin, and were
in truth no gods at all. And to estimate the great-
ness of this advantage we must take into view the
nature of the adverse arguments. The Pagan cham-
pions did not too much embarrass themselves by
defending the popular forms and fables of the old
religion. Perhaps, to the credulous villager, the re-
ligion of Porphyry might have been as unintelligible
or as odious as that of St. Paul. All these incum-
brances 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 mis-
chievous activity of the spirits of evil. The Pagan
champion, then, was himself 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 circumstances like these,
that any principle of inward life, under whatever
incrustations, was latent in the mythology as it lay
before their eyes, would have been to betray the
truth. And any seeming approach to that admission
such as allowinkthatthat foul and loathsome corpse
had once been alive in youthful health and beauty,
might have sorely hindered and perplexed the Chris-
tian argument on its way to the general mind. As
respects the religious ideas of the Greeks, properly
so called, and their philosophic tenets, the scholars of
the 17th century seemed to have occupied much the I
same ground with Eusebius and the early Christian
writers. But as respected their mythological person- I
ages, not having the Pagans to argue with, they
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
wrorg in principle. We are not called upon to be-
lieve that Neptune was Japhet, or that Iphigenia
was Jephtha's daughter ; or that Deucalion was
Noah, or that Bellerophon was really Joseph in the
house of Potiphar, notwithstanding certain resem-
blances of circumstances by which these and some I
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 belies e 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 Shotn, the ccirmon religious traditions. They
could not but go, as lEneas is fabled to have gone
from Troy,--
"Cum patribus populoque, Penatibus, ac magnis 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 vene-
rable document of human history, the argument
still remains much the same. The progress of
ethnological and philological research still supplies
ns with accumulating evidence of the chain of
migrations, north and westwards, of the Turanian,
and especially of the Aryan races, from points neces-
sarily undefined, but in close proximity with the
seats of the patriarchal nomads ; and has not sup-
plied us with any evidence, or with any presump-
tion whatever, that their known traditions sprang
from any fountainhead other than that which is
described in the "Book of Genesis" as the three-
branching fathily of Noah. If, then, upon 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, Tvhich could not but include re-
ligion, the question occurs in all its force, how was
it Mil possible that they could leave behind them
their religious traditions upon the occasion of their
lira 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 sys-
tems 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 cur-
rent of human migration, we should find remain-
ing tokens of affinity to any religious system,
which upon competent evidence we might believe
to have prevailed among the races most closely
and directly connected with that seat. And
this antecedent probability 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
iu 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 confu-
tation. To collect and present this mass of evidence,
with a careful and strict appreciation of the respee_
tive 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 an-
nounced at the commencement. I submit, then, to
you that the true " Prxparatio 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 Patriarch and the Jews, but extends likewise
to other fields of human history and experience,
among which, in modes and in degrees, varying
perceptibly to us, the Almighty distributed the ope-
rations preliminary and introductory to his one
great, surpassing, and central design for the reco-
very and happiness of mankind. So that in their
several spheres, some positive, some negative, some
spiritual, some secular, with a partial consciousness,
or with an absolute unconsciousness, all were 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. Intheboardye
of those traditions of primitive religion which
handed down to us in the Book of Genesis, and
which I shall make no further apology for treating
as records of great historic weight, there are mani-
festly included what I may term a humanistic ele-
'lieut. 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

inio 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 raaching into the
fardistantfuture. On the contrary, every precaution
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
the body of Moses 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 have been especially pointed
against the execution by human hands of the figure
of a man. For we hear in Holy Writ of the serpent
made , by Moses and exhibited to the nation : and
the brazen sea of the Temple rested upon 12 brazen
oxen. There were cherubim in the Ark framed by
Moses ; 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 attrac-
tive, and the most enchaining. A pure Theistic
system was maintained, 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 deliver-
ance. 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 solitary place
which the Redeemer of the world was to fill.
Counterfeits there were, but they had not that
dangerous resemblance to the truth which would
enable them to make head against the Messiah
when He should arrive. And so after He had
come, His only rivals and competitors in
Judaea were conceptions, distorted in the ab-
stract, of His character and office ; far different
from those solid formations of an embodied and or-
ganised 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 appro-
priated to itself, and was intensely permeated by,
that very anthropomorphic element which the Mo-
saic 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 especially
associates the early Greek mythology with the hu-
manistic element of primitive tradition, I venture to
name the character of Apollo as pre-eminently sup-
plying such a link. He is born of Zeus, but he is
not born of Here. Through him the divine counsels
ale 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 time of Homer, with whom
Apollo and the Sun are perfect 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 masculine beauty in
the human form, is assigned by tradition the con-
quest alike over Death and over the might of rebel-
lious spirits. In his hands we find functions of such
rank and such range that we cannot understand
how they could pass from him to Zeus, the supreme
deity, until we remember they are the very functions
assigned by a more real and higher system to the
Son of God ; the true Instructor, Healer, Deli-
verer, Judge, and Conqueror of Death, in whom the
power and majesty of the Godhead were set forth in
the world. The character of this deity, whom
Eusebius calls " the most venerable and the wisest"
of the whole Olympian order, affords, in my opi-
nion,the most complete and varied proof of the tradi-
tional relationship to which I now refer. Abundant
evidence, however, of the same character might be
adduced under many other heads. But I do not re-
fer to this weighty subject at present with a view of
leading you to affirm the existence of such a rela-
tionship ; that could not legitimately be done, ex-
cept upon a scrutiny, both deliberate and minute,
of a great mass of evidence, 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 casting light upon a 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 man-
ner clearly and broadly separating it from the other
religions of the ancient world. It has anthropomor-
phism for the soul and centre of all that is distinc-
tive 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 mytho- 1
logy, such as it wears
.in the works of Homer, its i
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
I 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 ele-
meuts or factors with which they were to assimilate
1 —Pelasgic, lonian, Egyptian, Phceuician, 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
apeople were born into that world on whose fortunes,
they were to exercise an influence almost immeasur-
able. The theology of Homer is the Olympian
system ; and that system exhibits a kind of Royal or
Palace life 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 the English epithet—rather a favourite apparently
with our old writers—the epithet jovial, which is
derived from the Latin name of its head. It is a
life of all the pleasures of mind and body, of banquet
and of revel, of music and of song ; a life in which
solemn grandeur 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 recom-
mendation to esteem, that it is not peopled with the
merely lazy and selfish gods of Epicurus, but its in-
habitants 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 in-
tense humanity, alike in its greatness and its little-
ness, its glory and its sham. As the cares and joys
of human life, so the structure of society below is
reflected, by the wayward wit of man, on 'leaven
above. Though the names and fundamental tradi-
tions of the several deities were wholly or in great
part imported from abroad, their characters, rela-
tions, and attributes passed under aHellenizing pro-
cess, which gradually marked off for them special
provinces and functions, according to laws which
appear to have been mainly original and 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 Athens are
almost universal, yet the Olympian society has its
complement of officers and servants with their pro-
per functions. Hephaistos moulds the 20 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 places in
the deep-folded recess of the mighty mountain.
The materials for the old religious outside of Greece
abnydtitlhe ipewGorsrehek races were in great part afforded first
of nature, and secondly by the wor-
ship of animals. Both of these the early Hellenic
system steadily rejected and eschewed; and their re-