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

1... •••••••

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 geniui could have prompted him
thus to pit against one another things really, in the
beliefBl mustnov ihny haveaoct incommensurable
anei ;knell re
ma
failedbl
acquainted e ;
Aristotleo tro haoinuwdlphpri
impress
withas lsteoahGwri
erneegm wi
aptwrhhnhiltie
hcos which
t-
seekers after truth. Warburton observes upon these
passageso f tthhaet t eey. wereAiid
iitn a
papcecaorrsd
that,ance ems•pi tehethe
ially
innumthbeerlteroatleayrenaersd
mofenA,lEiltzl'isshliafne,d tfhoerreei
glnr,ersuecha
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,
Bishop of Avranches, pushed their undertaking
into undue and fanciful detail. But I have not
found that they propounded any doctrine in
reference to the derivation of heathen literature
from Jewish sources, either to the 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 peculiar 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
r cnGoo:
sopvoeenl r yly
was aonfndoi
ttmoralbrluryte
rne
goofvuaei trvieoedr
yn t
tooh fi
givegm aeanlnskeai ncidcno,
uttnhhtee,
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-
strop. 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 primeval 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 " Pmparatio 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-
cepntaitnuraes. far as
ewstaison heresuppli themaedrises,if the
bytuheellleignhict
of
tfraonindPll)lhcecenincii:iaanobdtaEingYiptt?,
it e come upon the chief error
Afrranoemde
hwgeohrtee
whence
i rdi
sidt religionhEagtyNpv
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-
tions
possessed a
of
The
view
his
takenarguments,
byEusebius
he convertsNvas, into a boast.
apprehend,
- *
thatgemeneenralt
ofly tAakleexnanbdyna not only denies the ori-
ginality the Christian apologists.
what St.
they
eirappropriation
Hebrew ideas ; and fancifully, I might say whim.,
sically, supports the charge by instances of pla-
tgriuntahli, tYbut of
treats the
G r
as Greeks a
theftln what
h
pla-
giarism perpetrated by one Greek authoc 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
dmmons, the invention of image-worship. Theo-
philus affirms that the gods of the heathen were
deadmen ; Lactantius, that they were reges maxilla •
et potentissinii. 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 thew for, did not deny or
great
hdisparagea
etehs
oifn tt 011101 es ce t uma la
rip,
erlol do
ui
Eusebius often calls them, that Plato so eminently
the great
as
of the voice of
commended by his intellectual debtor, the great St.
Augustine ; nor did they make light
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 f ouud in aucieut