Connecticut western news., 1897-04-01

If his oratorical power of expression from the Greeks That he had studied their literature was evident when, standing in the presence of an audience of Greek scholars on Mars hill, which overlooks Athens, he dared to quote l from one of their own Greek poets, either Cleanthus or Aratus, declaring, AS certain also of your own poets have | said, For we are also his offspring. J | And be made accurate quotation, Clean thus, one of the poets, having written: | For we thine offspring are. All things that | ..s creep
 | Are but the echo of the voice divine.
 And Aratue, one of their own poets, had written:
 l Doth care perplexY Is lowering danger nighf | We are his offspring, and to love we fly. | It was rather risky thing for Paul to attempt to quote extemporaneously l from a poem ill a language foreign to l his and before Greek scholars, but Paul | did it without stammering and then l acknowledged before the most distin- | guished audience on the planet his in- l debtedness to the Greeks, crying cut in | his oration, "As one of your own poets | has said.
 Inventors of Architecture. l Furthermore, all the civilized " orld, l like Paul, is indebted to the Greeks for l architecture. The world before the time 1 of the Greeks had built monoliths, obe- | lisks, oromlechs, sphinxes and pyramids, | tut they were mostly monumental, to | the dead whom they failed to memorial \ iZe. We are not certain even of the names of those in whose commemoration | the pyramids were built. But Greek | architecture did lA0st for the living. Ignoring Egyptian precedents and bor- | rowing nothing from other nations, | Greek architecture carved its own col umns, set its own pediments, adjusted its own cntablatures, rounded its own moldings and carried out as never be- fore tie three qualities of right build I ing, called by an old. author 'firmitas, l utilitas, stas'-namely, irmness, 1 usefulness, beauty.
 | Although the Palthenon on the Acrop- oils of Athens is only wreck of the l storms and earthquakes and lombard ments of many centuries, and although l Lord Elgin took from one side of that building, at an expense of $250, 900, two shiploads of sculpture, one shipload going down ill the Mediterranean and the other shipload now to be found in the British museum, the Parthenon, l though ill comparative ruins, has been an inspiration to all architects for cen- l turies past and will be an inspiration | all the time from now until the world 1 itself is a temple ruin. Oh, that Parthe- non! One never gets over having once seen it. But what must it have been 1 when it stood as it's architects, Ikitnos and Kallikrates, built it out of Penteli- l can marble, white as Mont Blanc at monday and as overwhelming. Height above height. Overlapping the august and majestic pile and rising from it's | roof was a statue of Pallas Promachus in bronze, so tall and flashing that sail ors far out at sea beheld the plume of l her helmet Without the aid of the | eternal God it never could have been | planned, and without the aid of God the chisels and trowels never could have | constructed it. There is not fine church
 building in all the world, or properly | constructed courthouse, or a beautiful art gallery, or an appropriate audito- 1 rum, or tasteful home, which, because of that Parthenon, whether its style or some other style be adopted, is not di- rectly or indirectly a debtor to the l Greeks.
 l Blessings of Sculpture.
 But there is another art in my mind the most fascinating, elevating and | inspiring of all arts and the nearest to the divine-for which all the world owes debt to the Hellenes that will never be paid. 1 mean sculpture. At ! least $50 years before Christ the Greeks perpetuated the human face and fo1m
 in terra cotta and marble. What ] bless l ing to the human family that men and
 women, nightly useful, who could live only within a century may be rerpetu-
 ated for five or six CT ten centuries!
 How wish that some sculptor contem-
 poraneous with Christ could have put
 his matchless form in marblel But for
 every grand and exquisite statue of
 Martin Luther, of John Knox, of Will
 liam Penn, of Thomas Chalmers, of
 Wellington, of Lafayette, of any of the
 great statesmen or emancipators or con-
 querors who adorn your parks or fill the
 niches of your academies, you are debt
 DTS to the Greeks. They covered the
 Acropolis, they glorified the temples,
 they adorned the cemeteries with stat
 ues, some ill cedar, some in ivory, some
 in silver, some in gold, some in size
 diminutive and some in size colossal.
 Thanks to Phidias, who worked in
 stone; to Clearchus, who worked in bronze to Dontas, who worked in gold,
 and to all ancient chisels of commemo-
 ration Do you not realize that for
 many of the wonders of sculpture we are debtors to the Greeksf
 Yea, for the science of medicine, the
 great art of healing, we must thank the
 Greeks. There is the immortal Greek
 doctor, Hippocrates, who first opened
 the door for disease to go out and health
 to come in He first set forth the impor-
 tance of cleanliness and sleep, making
 the patient before treatment to be wash-
 ed and take slumber on the hide of 8
 sacrifice beast. He first discovered the
 importance of thorough prognosis and
 diagnosis He formulated the famous
 oath of Hippocrates which is taken by
 physicians of our day. He emancipated
 medicine from superstition, empiricism
 and priestcraft. He was the father of
 all the infirmaries, hospitals and medic
 al colleges of the last 23 centuries.
 Ancient medicanient and surgery had
 before that been anatomical and physi-
 ological assault and battery, and long
 after the time of Hippocrates, the Greek
 doctor, where his theories were not
 known, the Bible speaks of fatal med
 ical treatment when it says. "In his
 disease he sought not to the Lord, but
 to the physicians, and Asa slept with
 his fathers And we read in the New
 Testament of the poor woman who had
 been treated by incompetent doctors,
 who asked large fees, where it says,