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

At

of its exact place in Greek life and in human history. present there is still on the whole a marked division between the two chief lines of study. In the Oxford meeting of the International Congress on the History of Religions,' last September, a noticeable feature of the section on 'Greek and Roman Religions' was the separation between the two motives, the two methods that are here applied. The one method was represented by such a paper as that of Professor Lewis Campbell on the Religious Ideas of Plato, the ripe fruit of scholarship and philosophy; the other by the various papers and discussions on the anthropological aspects of Greek (and Roman) religious customs which proceeded from the modern tendency to bring these peoples into line with all other primitive races in this sphere of research.

The reconsideration which may be expected will, when it comes, probably shew the inadequacy of estimates of the relation of the actual creeds and cults of the popular mind to philosophy, such as have been made even by profound scholars; e.g. Professor Burnet says: 'A man might believe or disbelieve that the mysteries taught the doctrine of immortality; the essential thing' (i.e. for ancient religion) 'was that he should duly sacrifice his pig. It follows then that the mysteries cannot have suggested any ideas to philosophy, and that their influence was merely external.' 1

II.

No real attempt can be made by the present writer to mark out the lines upon which a study of the Greek thinkers in this special light should proceed; but a few considerations may be given, especially as some of Dr. Adam's chapters are very suggestive in this connexion. Dr. Adam's main object was to shew the development of religious ideas in the two spheres of poetry and philosophy-the former marked by sympathy with popular conceptions, the latter by opposition to these and search for a more excellent way. The poets endeavoured, with the effort of a genius that has 1 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, chap. ii.

been touched by the incommunicable charm which only the faiths of its own people can exercise upon genius, to purify and ennoble those faiths by a lofty interpretation. The full significance of the Greek poets' attempt to make the legends of mythology vessels for the highest moral and spiritual conceptions of which their age was capable has not always been appreciated, a lack of realization encouraged possibly by the fact that the last great tragedian, Euripides, did not carry on this tradition and went beyond even the philosopher in his destructive scepticism and free speculation. Where the poets have been best remembered in connexion with the history of religious ideas is probably in those sublime passages of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides which may be taken either as ancillary to the religious constructions of the philosophers or, more generally, as expressions of that pantheistic conception of the universe which has been so permanently attractive to the spiritual imagination of poetic genius. Such outpourings have universal interest for philosophy and religion. But considered historically, as a stage in religious growth, a more important aspect of the teaching of these poets is their treatment of the national myths.

The interest of the religious student in the more philosophical aspects of the dramatic poets is natural, since it has been more to the philosophers than to the poets that students of religious thought have looked. It is in this spirit that Dr. Adam devotes some labour in his Gifford Lectures (see especially those on Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato) to an exposition of that in the Greek thinkers which may be regarded as belonging to a stream of thought which contributed ideas to Christian theology. The lectures in general also seem to illustrate the truth that a great philosophic development cannot be very far from religious development, a truth which has perhaps its profoundest example in the perplexities and interest surrounding the question whether Plato's 'Good' (rò ȧya@óv) is, in his system, equivalent to God. If, however, we are to lose nothing of the historic as well as the universal significance of the more spiritual element in Greek thought we shall