About 550 B. C. the celebrated Kong-fu-tzee or Confucius collected the traditions of Fo and Laou-tse. Before his day the Chinese, while they believed in a Supreme God, worshipped genii and tutelary gods, and offered victims and sacrifices on high places. The Chinese have always been conspicuous for the homage they paid to their ancestors, blended with their religious rites; worshipping their spirits or manes, they made gods of them. Confucius confined himself so entirely to practical things, good laws, and maxims of morality, that not a single doctrine respecting the Deity, and the immortality of the soul, is to be traced in his writings. His style is extremely laconic. His morality is of a higher order than that of any other pagan writer. The doctrine of the forgiveness of injuries is emphatically set forth and enjoined by him. It is strange also to hear such words as these from a pagan: "Worship the Deity as though he were present." "If my mind is not engaged in worship, it is as though I worshipped not." Confucius, however, never refers to a pure and righteous God, whose moral law is broken by sin. The Chinese moralists had very imperfect ideas of a future state. Instead of a future retribution, they endeavored to support virtue by rewards and punishments administered by Divine Providence in this life. After his death, Confucius became one of the chief objects of worship by the Chinese. The whole empire was dotted over with temples to him. Sixty thousand animals were provided by government, besides numerous private ones, to be sacrificed to his manes.

Speaking of the ancient philosophers, the learned Dr. Shuckford, in his "Connection of Sacred and Profane History," says: "If we look over all the philosophers, and consider what the treasures of knowledge were, which they had amongst them, we shall find that there were many beams of true light shining amidst their dark and confused notions; but this light was never derived from any

use of their reason, for they never could give any reasonable account of it. The invisible things of God had been some way or other related to them; and as long as they were contented to transmit to posterity what their ancestors had transmitted to them, so long they preserved a considerable number of truths; but whenever they attempted to give reasons for these opinions, then in a little time they bewildered themselves. Under a notion of advancing their science, they ceased to retain the truth in their knowledge, and changed the true principles of things which had been delivered to them into a false, weak, and inconsistent scheme of ill-grounded philosophy."

TH

CHAPTER XLII.

FIRST THEATRES-FIRST ACTORS-FIRST TRAGEDIES.

HEATRICAL representations have been found in some form in almost all lands. By some they have been thought to have originated from a natural tendency to mimicry, almost universal. This is in a great measure true as regards the modern drama. But it will be found that in most countries dramatic representations originally sprang from, and were connected with, their religion; that they grew out of their religious festivals. It was so with the ancient heathen, as far back as their history reaches; it is so with the Indian in his characteristic buffalo and other dances of the present day. In early Greece, at the periodical festivals of their several deities, bands of singers and choristers, accompanied by musical instruments, sang the praises of the god. At some of these festivals, beside the singers, there were performers personating fauns and satyrs; they being, in popular belief, the regular attendants of the god. Thus these festivals became a kind of carnival. From these religious festivities started the splendid drama of the Greeks. The singers and performers at these festivals were first stimulated to rivalry by the gift of a goat as a prize for the best improvisation. Hence the word Tragedy, or song of a goat. About the middle of the sixth century, before Christ, Thespis, a native of Icaria, introduced a change by coming forward in person, with his features masked, and describing with gestures some mythological story: and then, by some remark, or by asking a question, making, from time to time, the chorus join in. On account of this, he is considered the inventor of the drama.

A second actor, with the introduction of dialogue, scenery, and dresses, was added by Eschylus, who was born of noble family about the year 525 before Christ, and is considered the "father of Tragedy," and the "theological poet" of Greece. He and his two celebrated brothers served their country in war, and were highly distinguished for their great bravery in several battles. Eschylus came nigh losing his life once under a charge of profanation, for introducing on the stage something connected with the mysteries. The Athenians stood ready to stone him to death, when his brother Aminias interceded for him, by dropping his robe and showing the stump of his own arm lost at the battle of Salamis. The Athenians could not withstand such an appeal and Æschylus was pardoned. He afterwards left his native city and went to Sicily, and died there in the sixtyninth year of his age. His death, if the common account is true, was of a singular nature. While sitting motionless in meditation in a field, his head, now bald, was mistaken for a stone by an eagle, which happened to be flying over him with a tortoise in her claws. The bird dropped the tortoise to break the shell, and the poet was killed by the blow. Æschylus was a follower of Pythagoras. In his sacred tragedies, seven of which remain, the great problems which lie at the foundation of faith and practice are discussed. In this respect they find their nearest counterpart in the book of Job. The actors in his plays handle the grand themes of theology very much as they are handled by the good and evil angels in Milton's "Paradise Lost."

Sophocles was born about thirty years after Eschylus. Being of a wealthy family, he was highly educated at an early age. When only sixteen years old he gained prizes for music; and at the age of twenty-five he bore off the prize in the tragic contests from all competitors, among whom was the veteran Eschylus, who had been for thirty years the master of the Athenian stage. Twenty times did Sophocles

bear off the first prize. His theology was not so strongly marked in its character, and had not so much of primeval tradition as that of Eschylus: proving what Æschylus had before held, that the more nearly tradition reached the beginning, the more truth is in it. Of the hundred tragedies written by Sophocles, seven only have come down to our day. In his old age Sophocles was appointed a priest to Alon, one of the hero-gods of Greece. He had previously served the state as a general and in other offices of trust. He died at the advanced age of ninety. A statue of him, discovered within the last twenty-five years, and now in the Vatican at Rome, represents him as the perfection of beauty and symmetry.

Part of God's plan of saving men is "by the foolishness of preaching." We have seen that preaching has been in the church since the days of Enoch. In this God meets a want of our nature, not only of the word itself, but in the plan of presenting it. How ready even little children are to listen to a tale well told! This mode of presenting instruction was adopted by the first heathen poets and historians. One of these poets presented his poems with a plot, and in a dialogue form spoken by himself and others, and the theatre appeared.

"The theatre," says an old Roman writer, "was invented for the worship of the gods and the delight of men." It owes its birth and growth to heathen worship: and when introduced it was used to impart instruction in religion. The drama was first exhibited in open air by day, under the pure light of heaven. It was a public institution; and the audience might be counted by tens of thousands, comprising all classes of the people. At times there were thirty thousand spectators in the theatre at Athens. Our word person comes from the mask worn by the actors in these plays, who, to make themselves heard in the vast amphitheatres, had the

1 1 Cor. i. 21.