generally replied by asking the question, 'Can't you let it alone?' This query may be pressed on those wishing for reunion- Cannot you be content at present to pray, to consult, to discuss? But do not formulate plans, put forth programmes, or try to force on practical action, for which no one is ready.'

There is a real danger that the desire for union may be degraded by becoming a craze; more than one noble ideal has been injured by incurring this misfortune. Anglican Churchmen are becoming more and more conscious of the isolation of their Communion, 'equally removed' as it is from all other phases of the Christian Religion. How their isolation (which is certainly to be deplored) may be wholesomely remedied is a large question, but only unwholesome results can accrue from getting into a fidget about it, and anxiously going the round of other Churches and denominations proposing schemes of union which apparently no one at present wants to have anything to do with. Our isolation is perhaps a punishment for the sins of our fathers; if borne in faith and patience, and with loyalty to the truth, it may yet be found that it had its valuable part to play in the working out of the destiny of the Church; but nothing save harm can come from pushing forward schemes of union which have to be supported by even temporary disloyalty to principle, or by slurring over the plain facts of history.

If one might suggest a motto to advocates of union it would be this-Donec effundatur super nos Spiritus de excelso.1 When it pleases the great Head of the Church to pour forth on His people in Scotland the Spirit of grace and of supplications, and when they confess and lament the sins of their Catholic, reforming, and Episcopalian forefathers, which have produced such bitter fruits of disunion and discord, then a burning desire to repair the evils past will draw all who are inspired by the heavenly afflatus into outward union in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. But until unity comes as the result of the work of the Holy Ghost in the hearts of Christians it had better not come at all.

1 Isaiah, xxxii. 15.

THOS. I. Ball.

ART. VI.-THE GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO

SPIRITUAL PROGRESS.

1. Religion in Greek Literature. By LEWIS CAMPBELL, M.A., LL.D. (London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1898.) 2. The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers. Gifford Lectures.' By EDWARD CAIRD, LL.D., D.C.L., Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Two Volumes. (Glasgow: Maclehose. 1904.)

3. The Rise of the Greek Epic. By GILBERT MURRAY, M.A., LL.D. (Oxford: at the University Press. 1907.)

4. The Religious Teachers of Greece. Gifford Lectures.' By JAMES ADAM, Litt.D. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. 1908.)

I.

THE growing interest which is devoted at the present time to the religious ideas which may be found in Greek literature seems to belong to an appeal to the Greeks somewhat new in the spirit in which it is made. This searching demand that the classic heritage shall yield fruit for religious thought differs from the earlier attempts to connect Platonism with Christianity, and Christian theology with Greek metaphysics. It shews indeed not less than these the resolution and earnest determination to find, if possible, a relation between the highest thoughts of pre-Christian humanity and the message and teaching of Christ. But it is distinguished from former attempts not only by the more historical method which belongs to the present age, but also by the fuller recognition which modern scholarship has made of the Greek spiritual achievement considered in itself, the realization of Greece as forming in her best period a 'white-hot centre of spiritual life in a world of effortless barbarism,' to quote the words of Professor Gilbert Murray. As a result the modern interest is less in the metaphysical foreshadowings of religious doctrines and more in any concordance of moral and spiritual conceptions and tendencies that can be traced. Thus it has come about that

1 Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 1.

at the very time when the continuance of Greek influence in education and culture is most seriously challenged there is in process, unnoticed by the most powerful and extreme of the critics, and almost unconsciously in the scholars and thinkers who are making the change, a higher appeal to Greek thought than ever before made in history.

It is probably too early to penetrate into the underlying cause of these needs in our own age which turn our thoughts in this new way towards the Greeks. It may be connected in some way difficult to analyze with the revival of a certain kind of intellectualism whic' was inevitably less active during the last century, when so much of the power of intellect was absorbed in the development of science. This revival is possibly all the stronger at a moment when that scientific energy seems to be devoted less to the spheres of discovery which make the greatest demand upon the imagination, and more to the application of the discoveries and principles won to general practical utility. Or it may be remotely related to the gradual disappearance of some false hopes, as to the possibilities of progress, in which many who began life at the period of greatest confidence in the further advance of humanity unconsciously grew up. At such a transitional epoch there may be, again, a natural tendency to look back with renewed curiosity to the work of a people who did so much for the truest kind of human development with resources so limited as regards depth and extent of knowledge, and to inquire afresh as to their spirit and methods. At the same time the mental discipline of the nineteenth century remains too strong to allow of acceptance of any guidance, from thought that is inexact or methods that neglect experience. A mysticism, for instance, which commands modern attention must be based on clear thinking; and this is one ground for the special interest in such a teacher as Plato-an interest, however, different in kind from that of the Cambridge Platonists, whose Platonism was that of Plato the mythologist, not that of Plato the dialectician.' 1

Of this modern interest in the spiritual side of Greek 1 J. A. Stewart, Myths of Plato.

VOL, LXVIII.-NO. CXXXVI.

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thought Dr. Adam's Religious Teachers of Greece is a striking example, as were also Dr. Edward Caird's Evolution of Theology amongst the Greeks and Professor Lewis Campbell's Religion in Greek Literature-three notable books by men for whose loss Greek scholarship and the whole republic of letters are the poorer. To these might be added Professor Gilbert Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic.

In the present article an attempt will be made, with some reference to these books, and in particular to that of Dr. Adam as being the most recent, to suggest what it is that the Greek spirit can give in response to this inquiry, or what is the most valuable contribution of the Greeks to spiritual progress; for this is the question that most concerns modern seekers and is of most permanent importance. It seems well, however, to point out that the religious teachers of Greece ought to be considered not merely in so far as they are teachers of mankind. The greatest of Greek teachers, in spite of a real intellectual aloofness from his people, never lost sight of the actual religious condition of the mass of men in an age when the intellectual and civil factors were immeasurably in advance of the religious. There seems to be a temptation to dwell upon the ideas left to us by the leaders of Greek thought on the questions of eternal interest, apart from their historical and social context. There is no longer so much excuse for doing this since the great advance recently made in the study of the religious conceptions of ancient Greece in accordance with modern scientific methods.

Certainly in few spheres is there so much need of caution in the exercise of the historical imagination. Here as elsewhere indeed the science of Comparative Religion comes to the help of the student, and in the researches of anthropology he finds keys that promise to unlock many doors. Thus fortified, and with the rich quarry of classical literature to dig in, he discovers innumerable witnesses to the existence in the founders of European civilization of all those fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings ' which are the main psychological origin of what may be termed the sub-religious ideas and practices of early peoples.

In due course the religious condition in ancient Greece has been given its place amongst the subjects treated by the student of primitive religions, and in this department the Greeks cease to be regarded as a nation set apart, with their extraordinary mythology, so great as an inspiration for art, if somewhat empty and meaningless to the religious spirit. Behind the cult of each of the leading mythological deities there are found to be luxuriant growths of myth, of reasoned and unreasoned custom resting on the primal superstitious motives of fear and hope, of awe and grief. Greek cults hardly, if at all, less than others reveal behind them the tragic delusions of the savage, and the shadow of human sacrifice rises from them to fall across the pages of the greatest poets of Greece. If, upon the one hand, the scholar has succeeded in demonstrating the kinship between early Ionian, Attic, and Doric religious feelings and those of barbarian races, on the other it has been more clearly recognized that the mystic element in religion, the existence of which in Greek peoples there has been some tendency to ignore, whether original to them or accepted from without, gained a powerful hold at the time of greatest national genius, and was not merely developed by the philosophers on account of its speculative interest.

It may appear paradoxical to argue that, in spite of all that archaeology and literature can do for us here, in addition to the scientific studies which help to the comprehension of the faiths and cults of other peoples remote from us in time, the task is more beset with difficulties in the case of Greece, and this on account of the very fact of our seeming intimacy with the Greek mind. There is, however, a peculiar difficulty in the effort to understand the religious imagination of a race in many aspects of its spirit so near to ourselves but one for which there was no great spiritual religion.

Notwithstanding this difficulty, the way in which the Greeks contributed to the spiritual development of the human race will, it is believed, be best understood in the future when the time has come for the consideration of their work in the light of the fuller knowledge we are gaining