receive, more than mere mention. They had parted, possibly on religious grounds, from their Indian brethren, had transformed their primitive naturalism into a sublime moral faith, changed the old nature-gods into demons, the struggle of light and darkness into the conflict of good and evil, and had settled in the highlands of Iran as tribes that were to grow by absorption and conquest into the great Persian Empire. How their faith grew, how much of it passed into Judaism, contributing elements that helped it to expand into a missionary religion, this paper cannot now tell. But Hellenism demands more than a momentary glance. In it IndoEuropean religious thought passed through some of its most extraordinary phases, and became so spiritualized as I wonder to be ready, when the highest Semitic faith appeared li Zounder a new form, to blend with it into a religion univer

working

sal, progressive, with the divine and human elements so united and harmonized as to change the slavish fear of the one race and the godless independence of the other into the love that made God dwell in man and man in God.

It has been common since Hegel to describe Hellenism as "the religion of the Beautiful.” The Greek mind was indeed æsthestically open and susceptible to a degree men of the colder and obtuser West can ill understand, but the Hegelian formula defines Greek religion as little as "the Christianity of the Beautiful" would define the Italian religion of the Renais

sance.* The Hellenic faith had as its basis or centre the

Result common Indo-European naturalism. Its gods were nature-4 the Fall

powers transfigured and glorified by the radiant genius. of Greece; its men were free and independent worshippers touched with the peculiar Grecian grace and reverence. The mythology had many imaginative, few ethical, elements, and never so escaped from epic and no co dramatic uses as to become a reasonable and moral

religious faith. The gods were spiritualized, but hardly became moral governors. Their authority was not exercised over or through the conscience, and sin in the Hebrew sense was unknown in Greece. Godliness did not involve righteousness. Holiness was too little of a divine attribute to make its pursuit a religious duty. The immoralities of the immortals easily apologized for those of mortals. But the old naturalism asserted its presence still more fatally in the denial of Providence or pity in the gods. They were changeful, radiant, stormful as Mother Nature. They doomed mortals to misery while they lived without care. Zeus had at his threshold two casks of gifts, one of evil, another of good; these he distributed mixed to one man, who fell now into good, again into evil; but to another man he gave the unmixed ill, which drove him miserable over the divine earth. He knows no more wretched being than man, and does nothing to *Welcker, "Griechis. Götterl.," ii. 168. + "Il.," xxiv. 525–535.

lighten his wretchedness, only sneers at it. The treacherous beauty, the brilliant promise that only mocks performance, the cruel serenity which only smiles at human grief, the power to nourish, the impotence to protect man, so characteristic of Nature, characterised the Greek gods. And these qualities of deity, softened and sweetened indeed, but never essentially changed, continued to live alongside the deepening ethical consciousness of Greece, and gave to its genius the mournfulness, the tragic sense of the sad and unequal struggle between the will of man and the merciless decrees of destiny, the insight into the bitter and ironical contrast between the passion and futile endeavours of the individual and the calm order and relentless march of the cosmic whole, that created what was most sublime and pathetic in Grecian poetry and history and philosophy.

For, however few ethical elements existed in the Greek religion, the Greek nature was eminently ethical. Faith in a moral order which man could not break unpunished, has had nowhere deeper root than in ancient Greece. This faith rose into sublimest expression when the nation was in its most heroic mood,-struggled into utterance in those tragedies of Eschylos which exhibit the fateful presence and inevitable action of Nemesis, in the sweeter and more refined and less gloomy dramas of Sophokles, where the picture is softened by a milder

character in God and greater reverence in man. Alongside the deepening current of moral belief flowed the stream of philosophical speculation, now metaphysical, inquiring into the cause and reality of things; again ethical, seeking to discover the origin, nature, and laws of virtue. The one unified and sublimed the idea of God; the other ennobled the nature and exalted the end of man. Greek thought could not rest satisfied with the physical conception of deity; speculated on the notion of cause and the idea of good till, transcending the received Polytheism without grasping an explicit Monotheism, it conceived an impersonal cause rather than a creator, a highest good rather than a one god. Religious thought, divorced from religion, had groped its way towards a supreme, not person, but abstraction. And so the ideas of personal reality and righteousness, moral action and rule, were associated with man rather than with God. rather than with God. Humanity, indeed, became the later Hellenic divinity, the vehicle of what was most divine in the universe. Art and philosophy combine to idealize man, the one to hold the mirror to what in him was beautiful, the other to what in him was good and true. Indo-European thought, which had started by finding God in the bright sky, appropriately ended in its most brilliant representative by finding deity in the heart and conscience of man.

The from a

III.

Hellenism may thus be regarded as the contrast and complement of Hebraism. The former came to reveal the fallendignity and divinity of man, while the latter had proclaimed the one righteous yet merciful God. Hebraism telegnit had found the supreme law in the Divine will, man's highest perfection in obedience to it. Hellenism discovered an eternal law of right written in the heart, realized in history, enforcing its authority by sanctions too dread to be despised. The prophets of the first spoke in the Theorem name of the Most High God, but the prophets of the ni light second spoke in the name of man; were the poets who her in sang of his heroism, his loves, his sufferings, his struggle for life against a merciless or ironical fate, the sculptors one sper who enshrine his beauties in forms so perfect that they needed but life to be god-like men, the philosophers

4

from self.

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her who at once uttered his yearnings after the Supreme Good and pointed out the path that led to it. Neither was complete in itself. Hebraism needed Hellenism to soften and humanize it, to translate it from an austere and exclusive theocracy into a gentle and cosmopolitan religion, which could illumine the homes and inspire the hearts of men with its own sweet spirit. Hellenism needed Hebraism to pour into its blood the iron of moral purpose and precept, to keep it from falling into impotence under its own unsubstantial abstractions, and set it bare-footed, as it were, upon the living God as

amazing