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

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, NOVEMBER 4, 1865.

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 the 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
bad 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 Hebrews on
the one side, worshipped from the beginning of man- j
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 inctun-
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 allowing thatthat 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
same ground with Eusebius and the early Christian
writers. But as respected their mythological person-
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
wrong 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
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 )Eneas is fabled to have gone
from Troy,—

"Cum patribus populoque, Ponatibus, ac magnis Dis."

But if there be those who would strangely forbid I I
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
us 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 family of Noah. If, then, upon this
ground, there is, to say the least, nothing to exclude
or to disparages but so much to support, the doctrine
of the original intercommunion of these races with
the Semitic tribes, which could not but include re-
ligion, the question occurs 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 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- I
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
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 confu-
tation. To collect and present this mass of evidence,
with a careful and strict appreciation of the respec-
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 " 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 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. 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 treating
as records of great historic weight, there are mani-
festly included what I may term a humanistic ele-
ment. 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
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 Decalogueappear 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,
I 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, 5a 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 I
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
axe 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 eLter,
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-
logy, such as it appears 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 ele-
ments or factors with which they were to assimilate
—Pelasgic, lonian, 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
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,
merely lazy and selfish
t hgaotdist
oi is
En opti
curus peopled
butw it
itl hs
e
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 Heaven
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 a Hellenizing 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
and the Greek races were in great part afforded first
by the worship of nature, and secondly by the wor-
ship of animals. Both of these the early Hellenic
system steadily rejected and eschewed; and their re-

ligion took its stand upon the idea which insepar-
ably 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 Olympian gods in groups clearly enough dis-
tinguished. The poems of Homer, far more Helle-
nic 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 Apollo in one of the noblest anthropo-
morphic passages of the poems. The Sun only once
appears as a person in the " Iliad," where he- re-
luctantly obeys the command of Here that by set-
ting 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, Xan-
thos, a river god, appears in the " Theomachy," but
he appears on the side of Troy; and he seems also
to have had one name as a deity with the Trojans,
another with the Greeks or Achains as a stream.
When Agamemnon offers solemn service 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 rivers. 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 mistake 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 Am-
phitrite 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. I turn to another head. Loth on
the one side to admit the imposing elements of Na-
ture-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 headquarters. 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 sun. In the island
of Thrinakie, detained by adverse winds, the com
panions of Odysseus are warned that under no ex-
tremity should they supply their wants by the de-
struction of these animals. Accordingly they resort
to birds and fish, unusual food with the Homeric
Greeks ; 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 recognized at the time in the Hellenic system ;
and introduced as it is during the voyage in remote
parts—which must have been based upon the tales
of the Phoenician mariners—it appears certainly to
belong to the Phoenician circle of mythology. And
here we find an example of the manner in whichthe
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 philosophers
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 types of men were content to boron down the
godlike head, were not, when the traditions that
defied them set foot on Grecian soil, thrust wholly
out of view ; but they were put into appropriate
and alwayssecondary places. The eagle of Zeus, the
falcon of Apollo, the peacock of Here, the owl of
Pallas, stood no higher in Greece than as accessories
to the figures on which they attend. 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 recriprocal incorporation of deity into man-
hood; which made the human form thelink 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 ma-
terials 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 na-
ture, which even the fiercest passions of war would
but rarely, and only for a moment violate. Hence
we find the highest refinements of the manners of
the gentleman existing at a time when, among the
Greeks, the material appliances of civilisation were
in their infancy, and when writing and the alphabet
were practically unknown. The sentiment of honour
is indicated, at this epoch, by a word (caws) too
delicate for our rendering by a single term in the
English, perhaps in any modern tongue. A cata-
logue of horrors that have stained the life of man
elsewhere, sometimes even in the midst of the
triumphs of culture and refinement, were unknown
in 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 in-
teresting, but to many startling, question whether human
sacrifices were in use among the Romans ; not the unlet-
tered semi-barbarians of Romulus or Tarquin, but the
Romans of Rome in its highest political power and its
palmiest civilisation. Naturally enough, a considerable re-
pugnance 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 Hellenio world, in the en/ins of almost every ,
god, and in all periods of their independent his- I
tory." That among the Romans it was still more rife
and that, though attempts were made to restrain or
put down the practice, even the famous edict of Adrian,
to which Eusebius allows the honour of its extinction,
failed to effect it ; nay, more, that " in every genera-
tion of the four centuries, from the fall of the Repub-
lic 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 de-
grees by perverse but accepted ideas of religion. Notwith-
standing this terrible and too well sustained indictment
against the unenlightened and the enlightened world, it is
pleasing to observe that this horrible rite did not originally
belong to the usages of Greece. 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 unsated vengeance, has none of the marks
of a religious site, and no relation to a deity. Of the tradi-
tions of Iphigenia, sacrificed in Antis for the welfare of the
Achaian host, Homer is wholly ignorant ; and Agamemnon
in the Iliad speaks of his daughters as open to the option .of
Achilles, as many fathers may since have done who had
t‘vo or three of them ready to marry, but so as almost to
supply sufficient evidence that no such blood-stained gap
had been made in the circle of his family. It is many cell-
t uries later, when the tradition reaches us in the works of
the tragedians. In that grandrst of all Greek dramas, tho
"Agamemnon" of .ZEschylus, his murderous wife Clytem-
nestra seeks an apology for her act partly in the immola-
tion of Iphigenia by her father's baud; 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 bar-
baric territory ; and the chorus of Greek attendants on the
doomed princess addressing the Deity, says, "Receive, 0
venerable one, this sacrifice, if it be a sacrifice agreeable
to thee, which the law of us Greeks declares to be un-
holy." 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 m 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 unconcious incest of CEdipus and
Jocasta drew down the heaviest calamities ; and further,
that we have no trace, among the Homeric records, not
only of canibalism but of violence to nature in any form.
The crimes of abortion and the exposure of infants autho-
rised 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 of Greece 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 at-
tested, among other ways, by the following signs :—An
intense admiration of personal beauty ; 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 remark-
able 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 upon the other side,
introducing but one vicious character, Thersites, among
the Greeks of the Iliad, he describes his personal appear-
ance with a degree of detail foreign to his habit, in order,
seemingly, 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 abundantly
significant. Courtesans of extraordinary beauty were
sometimes chosen to march in the processions of the gods.
By the side of the evil tradition of Aphrodite the promis-
cuous, there lingered long the rival tradition of an Aphro-
dite 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 eccentricity of •
feature, I have not seen it proved, in such partial exami-
nation of the subject as has lain within my power, that
the Greeks 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 defer-
laity 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 : and the rarity or absence of it, among a people
possessed of such high sarcastic power as the Greeks, sug-
gests 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 likelihood than in the early and continued
association .of that form with the highest object of religion.
I will now refer to the feeling of the Homeric period con-
cerning the sacredness of the human body against both
violation and exposure. The horror of Priam in anticipat-
ing his own death at the coming sack of Troy rises to its
climax whon he brings into the picture the tearing and
defilement by dogs of his own exposed and naked figure.
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. Nor was this respect for decency
dshallow or shortlived tradition. 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 exaggeration,
the palm of the victor uplifted even the lords of earth to
the honours of the gods. Yet, important as it was for per-
fection in those unparalleled contests to free the person
from the restraints of clothing, Thucydides in his preface
tells us that the athletes were formerly covered; that the
Lacedasmonians 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 whon 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 ef-
fective as the position which it assigns to woman. For as
the law of force is the law of the brute creation, so, in pro-
portion as he is under the yoke of that law, does man ap-
proximate to the brute ; and in proportion, on the other
hand, as he has escaped from its dominions, is he ascend-
ing into the higher sphere of being, and claiming relation-
ship with deity. But the emancipation and due ascendancy
of woman are not a mere fact ; they are the emphatic asser-
tion of a principle ; and that principle is the dethronement of
the law of force, and the enthronement of other and higher
laws in its place, and in its despite. Outside the pale of Chris-
tianity it would bo difficult to find a parallel, in point of ele-
vation, 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 Greeks as com-
pared with that of the Hebrew woman. Among the Jews
polygamy was permitted; to the Greeks, as has been said,
it was unknown. Tales like that of Amn on and Tamar, or
like that of the Levito and his concubine, are not found
even among the deeds of the dissolute Suitors of the Odys-
sey. Among the Jews the testimony of our Lord is that be-
cause 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 20 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 any-
thing, of its deeper significance and force, even if we be-
lieved that the persons whom the poet names Odysseus and
Penelope have never lived. It must be observed, too, what,
in the mind of Homer, constitutes 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. Net 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 posi-
tion. She is importuned, but she is net insulted. She feels
horror and aversion, but she has no cause for fear. Such, in
the 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 Andr oma the is not more touching by
its immeasurable tender ness 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 social purity, 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 cha-
racter, 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 na mes of
mistresses and courtesans are entered on the roll of fame,
and Phryneyedicated in a Phocian temple a gilded statue of
herself, which was wrought by the hand of Praxiteles. In-
deed, 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 illus-
trate 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 Pausani as. An Arcadian,
named Skedasos, living at Leuctra, had two daughters,
who were violated by Lacedaemenian youths. Unable to
bear the shame, they put an end to their lives. Their fa-
ther, also, having in vain sought justice from the Spartan
authorities, sternly recoiled from tlie 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 sinsular character. The
statue of Theagenes, the Thasian athlete, after his death,
foil 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 life. 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 re-
semblance between this law and the English law of deo-
dand, which involved the forfeiture, says Blackstone, of
" whatever personal chattel is the immediate cause of the
death of any reasonable creature." But I think that, wi▪ th
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 ma-
norial right, or in the Gothic codes, into a compensation
for homicide, payable to the surviving relatives. But it
proceeded upon the principle of making the owners pay ;
materialthough t hf
nesyt
ru paid
me
n int r e
Ts pherct
Go
rf
ehe
ko m
lawi ci df enfeffectedutnhfrsohumgehn at
upon the inanimate matter itself for having violated the
sanctity of human life. In this essential point it exactly
corresponded with the remarkable law of Moses, whi▪
ch
said " If an ox gore a man that he die, the ox shall be
stoned,previsiean falls
ahl
s greatlyisflesh short
of not bt
he ee
fautlei n.".
spirit Buto f theev Greek
n th:s
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 anthropo-
morphic 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 eminently poetical ; for it ful-
filled in the most striking manner that condition which
poetrywo
ralbdos voef aslolurleganudiress,enhsea.rinEovny eryin river,tle rfeoluant
Taioni
nb twgrove,eenthe
and hill was associated with the Mart 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 abounded in the country
n
was also favourable to art. The Athenians, however, are
stated
neglected,
7bebeenaubty was
sful ; and at Sparta, where
art was not
immensely prized. And,
. indeed, the personal 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 religion, 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 Greek art, not very many, I imagine,
bear the mark of having been intended for worship. The
great size required for statues like the Atheno of the Par-
thenon 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 material,
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 been due to the necessity of condescen-
sion to the popular taste in connection with an object of
worship. Although, therefore, the highest artists wore
employed, it does not appear probable that they derived
any part of their higher inspiration from the fervour of
the multitude of the worshippers in the temples. Neither
will it avail to urge the great esteem in which the profes-
sors 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 Archon s 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; andif the
estimation flowed from the excellence, whence came excel-
lence itself ? Both the one and the other were perhaps due to
another cause. That many accessories contributed to the
wonderful result Ido not doubt. But mainly and essenti-
ally, 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 rendering of the human form.
What, then, could be so calculated to raise this represen-
tation to the acme of its excellence, as the belief that the
human form was not only the tabernacle, but the original
and shape, the inseparable attribute, of Deity itself? In
the quaint language of George 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 Greek artist that cheered him and rewarded
him, and yet, while it cheered him and rewarded him, still
ever spurred him on in his pursuit. 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 familiar to him,
by correspondence of shape : but on the other side, its ele-
ments, which it was his business to draw forth and indicate
to men, reached far away into the infinite. And I know not
what true definition there is for an age or people of the
highest excellence in any kind, unless it be perpetual effort
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
transcendent excellence of the Greek artist lay in his be-
ing, by his birth and the tradition of his people, as well
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 compo-
sition 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 groat 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 prepara-
tion of which, all the while, Divine Providence was brood-
ing, 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
achievements 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 specu-
lations 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 pro-
foundly embedded 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 propound-
' ing, 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 obey-
ing a congenial impulse that sprang from the depths of
their being. Whatever philosophy was to be indigenous
in Greece could not but be predominantly and profoundly
human ; and their power and fame, as analysts of our un-
fathomable constitution, are fresh and unabated at the pre-
sent 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 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 Greeks, of corporal with mental excellence.
From the beginning of the race Homer shared the privi-
lege of his most gorgeous epithet between battle and de-
bate. The Odes of such a poet as Pinder, handing on-
wards the tradition of the twenty-third Iliad, commemo-
rate, so to speak, the marriage of athletic exercise with the
gift of song. We do not trace among the Greeks that con-
trast, which is found so rude and sharp elsewhere, between
energy in the body and energy in the brain. The Greek
was in this like Adam in the noble verse of Milton,
For contemplation and for valour born.
And the Greek philosophy was for nothing more remark-
able than the manner in which it not only asserted but
felt as an elementary law, the place of the body in human
education. This with no exclusive or peculiar view to what
we should call utilitarian purposes,:such as those of defence
or industry, or oven 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 a mere vesture, or tool, or appendage of the soul,
but, like the soul, an integral part of man himself. This
plenitude and 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 mat-
ter, and a disposition to identify it with the principle of
evil. The philosophy of Socrates, of Plato, and of Aristotle,
seems to have steered clear and safe between this Scylla
and this Charybdis. But again, the Greek 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 perceptions
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 fac-
tors of the human being, he had yet less conception. We
may say then that he lay under every temptation to a dis-
paraging view of the body and of its office. Yet, in spite of
his immense disadvantage, it fell to him to find a place for
the body in the philosophy of human nature, and to incor-
porate the principle thus conceived in laws, usages, and
institutions, 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 him was
familiar and elementary in both; but 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 ad-
vantage of personal beauty. They must be energetic ; and
ho therefore proceeds to treat of the character of the
cinXO7rovos, or diligent man. He must be ready and
keen in study; for human souls are much more cowardly
in strong studios than in exercises 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 be be fond
of athletic exercise and of sports, but not apt for learning
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 com-
plete 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, with that existence which we
necessarily regard as the largest and most complete,namely,
with the Divine. It may indeed be said that the Greek
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 Greek mind with all its powers either to at-
tain 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 preparing for our use, how it was, if I may so express
myself, the secular counterpart of tho Gospel, and how it
became, in one word, the groat intellectual factor of the
Christian civilization. Now it is not I think difficult to see
what materials and instruments, such as it furnishad, were
required. 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 con-
trols their action were withdrawn. We see, then, in the
Greeks, beyond all question, these two things—first, a pe-
culiar and powerful element of anthropomorphism pervad-
ing their religion, and giving it its distinctive character ;
secondly, a remarkable fullness, largeness, subtlety, eleva-
tion, 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 Tears, 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 preserving principle of
all the residue, and has maintained 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 occu-
pation of this broad sphere of exertion and enjoyment, that
the Greeks were, in the councils of Providence, ordained
to labour; that so the Gospel, produced in the fulness of
time, after the world's long gestation, might have its ac-
complished work in rearing mankind up to his perfection,
first in the spiritual life, but also, and through that spiritual
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 pro-
vidential 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 pro-
fit, 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 fundamental conception
of the unity of God, the sole and absolute condition under
which the Divine idea could be upheld among men at its
just elevation. No poetry, no philosophy, no art of Greece
ever embraced, in its most soaring and widest conceptions,
that simple law of love towards God and towards our neigh-
bour, on which " two commandments hang all the law and
the prophets," and which supplied the moral basis of the
new dispensation. There is ono history, and that the most
touching and most profund of all, for which we should
search in vain through all the pages of the classics—l 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 of enduring joy. For
the exercise 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
balance of our inward being; if the highest of all condi-
tions 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. Pa-
lestine was weak and despised, always obscure, oftentimes
and long trodden down beneath the feet of imperious mas-
ters. Greece for a thousand years,
Confident from foreign purposes,

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 subdued to hcr literature, 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 the world could give her; but the flowers of
Paradise, which blossom thinly, blossomed in Palestine
alone. And yet, as the lower parts of our bodily organisa-
tion are not less material than the higher to the safety and
well-being of the whole, or Christianity itself was not
ordained to a solitary existence in man, but to find helps
meet for it 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 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 about to be established. And the
question arises whether, among the auxiliaries 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 narrow 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 materials to assist in
the cultivation of the entire nature of man, and to conse-
crate all his being to the glory and the designs of his
Maker. Yet in part they might have a purpose more spe-
cial still—the purpose of assigning due bonds to the action
of impulses springing out of Christianity itself. Now, that
narrow conception which I have mentioned, 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 imaginable 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 cer-
tainly it was not toScripture itself that opinions like these
were due. In a dissertation " On the Prophecies of the
Messiah Dispersed among the Heathen," Bishop Horsley
has shown what a large amount of 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 inconsistent 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 ex-
pressly devoted to setting forth the burden of Nineveh and
the dealings of God with its inhabitants; and Eastern Magi
were, in the words of Bishop Horsley, " the first worship-
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
proper 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 applying itself in the life
and conduct of the individual and in the laws, institutions,
and usages of society. In the building up of the human
temple, the several portions of the work, while sustaining
and strengthening 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 princi-
ciple.it consists of many parts, and in order to preserve re-
ciprocally 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 Gevernor of the world,
are made to serve the purposes that have their highest ex-
pression 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 re-
quires, the aid of secondary means. It is manifest, indeed,
that there was in Christianity that which men 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 the performance of his
duties as a member of civil society. " Par 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 befree or a 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 ap-
petite 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 Chris-
tian 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 grow more vehe-
ment and eager. The deserts of Egypt were peopled with
thousands upon thousands of anchorites, who foreswore
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 re-
lation to the unseen world. True and earnest in their
Christian warfare, they, notwithstanding, represent a spurt
of exaggeration, which it was necessary to check, uproot-
ing what they ought rather to have pruned, and destroy-
ing 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 exagge-
ration 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 Geerl
from all else that is beautiful and glorious in creation,
it
would have exposed the spiritual teacher to a resistelir
not only vehement but just, and would have placed Ine
kingdom of grace in permanent and hopeless discord with
the kingdoms of nature, reason, truth, and beauty, king-
doms established by the very same Almighty hand. Those
principles of repression,' which were indispensable as the
medicine of man, was 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 heathenignl
but to check their usurpation; and to keep . them Withie,
their bounds ; and this was to be effected not by prehihe
tion or disparagement, but by vindicating for every Part'
and power,and work, of human nature, and for 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, whatsoeVeirt
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report:
there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think ell
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
c
in securing a well-balanced development of the powers 0.1
the Christian system, and to prevent the instruments de-
signed for eradicating the seeds of disease from subverting
the yet higher agencies appointed for the fostering and ,de-
velopment of life in every region of our being and our ger-
vity. Volumes might be written with profit to trace Of
application of the principles touched upon in this na'
dress 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.►
..1111-
which I have now attempted is no more, in effect, t'lVn
a suggestion which may open the way for others into
a wide and ever-widening field. And if that suggestion 17°
just it will be difficult to deny its importance. Let us Oil
in a few concluding words at some of its results. Firett.2
places on high and safe grounds that genial primacy of e w
Greeks in letters and in human culture, to the acknowledt
ment of which Christian Europe has been guided n 0 ,keire
much by a logical process, or a definite forethought, es "'
a sure instinct with the after confirmation of a long expo'
rience. Nor can this primacy be justly disturbed bY
multiplication, and the energetic and growing pursuL°,i
those branches of knowledge for which this age has ":4""
so remarkable. For Aristotle it was excusable to regart
the heavenly bodies as objects nobler than man. But
Christianity has sealed and stamped the title of our race
the crown and flower of the visible creation ; and with iine
irreversible sentence in their favour, the studies, well
studies of humanity, shoudl not resent nor fear, but she";ar
favour and encourage all other noble research having 1;
its object the globe on which we live, the tribes erithWiiijb.
r
it is peopled in land, air, and sea, the powers drawn fe'''„
from nature or yet latent in her unexplored recesses, "
the spaces of that vast system—
" Ultra flammantia mainia mundi,"
to which our earth belongs. But more than this; we ii"
in times when the whole nature of our relation to the
seen world is widely, eagerly, and assiduously question°
Sometimes 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 undo'
results, but seeming to crush and bury under thou' th°
ruins of our will, our freedom, our personal responsibility.
Sometimes of a private judgment, which we are to held
upon the hard condition of taking nothing upon 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 ei
proof; in a word, of beginning anew each man for him'
self; a privilege which I had thought was restricted
the lower orders of creation, where the parent infuses no Pre'
judices into its litter or its fry. Such are the clouds careering
in heaven, and pass between us and the sun, and make Ina"„,
idly think that what they see not is not, and blot the pros-
pects of what is in so many and such true respects a h&P11
and a hopeful ago. It is I think an observation of SB7
Augustine, that those periods are critical and formidable,
when the power of putting questions runs greatly in ad-
vance of the pains to answer them. Such appears toll Ded
the period in which we live. And among us, who are eatef
in any manner to move in the world of thought, we je-1
ask who is sufficient for these things ? Who can with J"-a
and firm hand sever the transitory from the durable,::o
the accidental from the essential, in old opinions ?
can combine, in the measures which reason would pro
scribe, reverence and gratitude to the past with a sense t?
the new claims, new means, new duties of the presejlo,
Who can be stout and earnest to do battle for the
and yet hold sacred, as he ought, the freedom of in4'
and cherish, as he ought, a chivalry of controversy lot
the ancient chivalry of arms ? One persuasion at leas', of
us embrace : one error let us avoid. Let us be persuade" a
this, that Christianity will, by her inherent resources
for herself a philosophy equal to all the shifting allaror
the growing wants of the time. Let us avoid the e'".., %s
of seeking to cherish a Chistianity of isolation. The 01P-i:
tianity which is now and hereafter to flourish, and,throls,
its power in the inner circles of human thought, to inao
ence ultimately, in some manner more adequate than n°,o
the masses of mankind, must be such as of old the Witif,,g
of God was described. " For in her is an understan;
spirit, holy, one only, manifold, subtil, lively, clear, lint is
filed, plain, not subject to hurt, loving the thing thud
good, quick, which cannot be Jetted, ready to do good' :or
to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all li0;00
overseeing all things. . . . For she is the brightness 01 of
everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the Pore!. of
God, and the image of His goodness." It' must be
full with human and genial warmth, in close sYrePeoe
with every true instinct and need of man, regardful of
just titles of every faculty of his nature, apt to aselob
with and make its own all, under whatever name, Wm"
goes to enrich and enlarge the patrimony of the race. 'n
therefore it is well that we should look out over the '`elos
of history, and see if haply its records, the more they
unfolded, do or do not yield us new materials for the S ~.
1
port of faith. Me at least, for one, experience bas et°,•oo
winced that, just as fresh wonder and confirmed convi°A-ft.
flow from examining the structure of the universe sl'" to
countless inhabitants, and their respective adaptstioono
the purposes of their being and to the use of man, the aPOO
results will flow in yet larger measure from tracing
red
footmarks of the Most High in the seemingly bewiltol
paths of human history. Everywhere, before us, and bc-Asl
us, and around us, and above us and beneath, we shall P
the power which—
Lives through all life, extends through all extent:
Spreads undivided, operates unspent. 0 „
00
And, together with the power, we shall find the goo
and the wisdom, of which that sublime power is
minister. Nor can that wisdom and that goodness 00
where shine forth with purer splendour than when 014
Divine forethought, working from afar, in many pleeee'ote
through many generations, so adjusts beforehand the s
and the affairs of men as to let them all converge liecied
single point, upon that redemption of the world, by osir•
made Man, in which all the rays of His glory are
trated, and from which they pour forth a flood of he- • 0.
light even over the darkest and saddest places of crest
test Mr. Vice-Chancellor, professors, and gentlemen, .1- tett
mend to your notice and your impartial research the 840
of the foregoing remarks. It is at least a less unW';ol
offering than the mere commonplaces of taking leave'
,Iti'
I claim one remaining moment to convey to you relibever
tude for your confidenceAto assure you that I sbsl•l r
feel a lively interest in all that pertains to the welfe;f°sll
your famous University, and to bid you resPec
farewell.

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lq it,
London : Printed and Pubitahed by WILLIAM
of No. 112, Strand, ninter, at Tktz Sufi Office,i' my
Strand, in the Precinct of the Scvoy. in the
Mithliesex.—Saturday, November 4, 1865.