both a progress and a decline. What may be called public morality attained afterward a higher standard, but private morality fell immeasurably below that of the heroic age. This point is well worthy of consideration. It shows us that, for some reason, that morality which stands nearest, as it were, to religion, lost its hold upon the hearts and lives of men, and at the same time, as civilization advanced, that morality which depends upon interest or worldly expediency, and which comes within the sphere of civil law, advanced also. For a time civilization without religion or religious morality was able to maintain the principles of society; but its foundations were undermined, and it lay at last a hopeless wreck, until it was rebuilt upon the enduring basis of Christianity. We are compelled, therefore, to recognize the higher position of that age, in which religion lent its sanction to morality, and from which a marvellous civilization sprang forth, which had its roots deep in the reverence and purity of the past, and grew from that genial soil to gigantic size and strength; but fell at last because it could derive no life from an atmosphere which had become hopelessly impure and corrupt. But it is time for us to turn our attention to the religion of the heroic age of Greece. The faith of men in supernatural power was, in that age, peculiarly strong. Every unusual manifestation in nature and even many ordinary phenomena were attributed to supernatural agency; and there was not merely this recognition of the existence of a power higher than nature, but there was also a very clear conception of a moral government of the world, in accordance with which the good were to be rewarded and the evil punished. The views of the future life which are presented in these poems are indeed somewhat vague and indistinct; but, as Mr. Gladstone says, their want of logical coherence indicates that they 66 can not be referred to any one generative idea or system, but may be distorted copies or misunderstood portions of rus. primitive truth." * There are, however, clearly presented three departments of the invisible world Elysium, Hades, and TartaWhile there is considerable confusion in regard to the respective character and functions of these receptacles of the departed, still it is evident that the moral government of the world is conceived of as projected into these unseen realms, and accordingly vice is there punished and virtue rewarded. At all events, the Homeric representation of the other world is greatly in advance of the utterly unsubstantial and morally ineffective conceptions of later times, as shown in the Ethics of Aristotle † or the Electra of Sophocles, or in fact in almost all the poetry and philosophy of antiquity. An examination of the religious system of Homer will satisfy us that so far from its being homogeneous, there are in it irreconcilable elements, which can not be blended harmoniously together. These different ele * II. 167. Nich. Eth. iv. 10. ments Mr. Gladstone supposes to be referrible to different origins: that, on the one hand, they are due to the formative mythological process which was already going on; and, on the other, had been handed down from the great primeval revelation. Those who receive the declaration of the Scriptures, that there was such a revelation, will not think it strange that fragments of it were still floating on the sea of time in the age of Homer; and those who do not believe in such a primitive revelation will find it exceedingly difficult to account for some very remarkable peculiarities, which we are about to consider, in the religion of the early Greeks. We claim that there is no explanation of these anomalies except on the supposition of a primitive revelation. That this religious system is a composite and not a simple one is evident upon a very slight examination. The various parts of it do not fit harmoniously together, and refuse to come into any logical order, even under the operation of the Greek mind, which was the most logical that the world has ever known. There is on the one hand great dignity and purity; on the other, much that is gross and corrupt. The various deities have not their respective spheres of operation clearly defined, as would have been the case if the system had been one of pure invention. It is evident that the process of invention is at work upon pre-existing materials. Now the question is, what are these materials? How can we distinguish them from what is merely inventive? Is there any way by which we can link them with the truths of the primitive revelation, and thus furnish new evidence of such a revelation and of the great facts with which it is connected? Mr. Gladstone calls these two elements in the religious system of Homer the traditive and the inventive. In attempting to separate the one from the other, we shall build our argument upon facts which he principally has furnished. The first step in the argument starts from the fact of the mixed character of the population of Greece in the heroic age. This popu |