morals, creed, and art-power. It does indeed seem, by sure record of history, that degeneracy of moral sense, even to the state described as a reprobate mind, came on them. They were, in many respects, delivered over to evil in this world; but this attempt at worship was a blind step in the right way. As Professor. Ruskin has set forth with great power and truth, in Aratra Pentelici (p. 46), their great iconolatry was not fetichism.1

We shall have to consider the parallel and competing influence of local superstition and various forms of fetichism with the idea of one God in the Greek mind. (See Ct. Rio's Christian Art. Introd.) Even the symbolic use of the graven image led either to unbelief, or to the idea of a local Presence; and Athens, indeed, knew not what she did. But, for a time, men were able to look through the gold and ivory of Zeus and Athenê to a God Unseen, Who was absolute power and perfect wisdom.

It seems to be a true and important observation of Professor Zeller's, that

'When Greeks looked on the world as a whole, in order to trace it to its original causes, they therefore acknowledged one single Creative Power in limine; whether they called it Nature, Divinity, or any other name. Many deciared expressly that this Divinity was only to be sought in the highest intelligence, in the Infinite Mind. Anaxagoras expressed this most decidedly, and with clearest scientific understanding.'

The reasons why he was called Atheist are not far to seek. It is well known that there was a great hieratic interest in Athens, in itself a political party, and centering in priestly families, like the Eumolpida. It may have had some true ground of ancestral religion, or symbolism of Divine Unity by the Mysteries; but its interference in politics, as Mr. Lloyd says, seems to have been always baneful. It undermined Pericles, it pushed on Nicias against his will, it twice drove Alcibiades into treason when all depended on him. It appealed-with party morality, and therefore more or less

1 'They reached the conception of true and great gods as existent in the universe, and absolutely ceased to think of them as in anywise present in statues or images; but they had now learned to make these statues beautifully human, and to surround them with attributes which might concentrate their thoughts of the gods. This is, in Greece, accurately the Pindaric time, just a little preceding the Phidian; the Phidian is already dimmed with a faint shadow of infidelity. Still, the Olympic Zeus may be taken as a sufficiently central type of a statue which was no more supposed to be Zeus than the gold or elephants' tusks it was made of.'

against personal conscience—to the ignorant prejudices of the Demus-and such appeal seldom fails of success, whether its consequences be only calamitous or completely ruinous.

The thoughts of the superhuman which are, in fact, expressed by the Pheidian sculptures may perhaps be thus approximated to in words: There is no doubt about the existence of God; there is no need to consider whether He is One or Many, since He is. But there are grave doubts and deep obscurities as to the detailed descriptions we have of Him and His manifestations, and of the best ways of approach to Him. Therefore we rejoice in these Agalmata or glorious symbols, signs, or likenesses by which we set Him forth to ourselves.' Greeks may well have been doubleminded on these great things. Educated thought was very different from popular feeling; perhaps the same man would think differently under the teaching of Xenophanes or Anaxagoras, or at a great function in the Parthenon; or again, among his vines and olives in the demus of Acharnæ or elsewhere. The national Deisidæmonia, which made Athenians dedicate so many altars, and celebrate so many festivals, was not all evil. It was connected with an abiding sense of the presence of Personal or Spiritual Life in mountains, woods, and waters; and with a Pantheism, which, in higher minds, amounted to something like abiding sense of the presence of Zeus through his elder children, the heroes, nymphs, and tutelar deities. This was a moral influence threatening the evil-doer. A foul deed defiled the very soil, being hateful to the indwelling gods of the land. Oreads, and naiads, and dryads were all about the country, present and observant, like a kind of police; to do evil on their beat was to do it before Zeus. The Personality of Greek Pantheism had its superstitious side, but it had also a noble and godly side. It has been observed before how Demosthenes appealed to Earth and Gods together; and the following passage from Mr. Lloyd sets forth much better than we can do, the sore earnest and real piety of such adjuration.

"When these divinities (Apollo and Here) are in any case appealed to with unusual seriousness, their nature-character reappears. Zeus is their greatest, most glorious, as cloud-compeller, as habitant of Æther; and the all-seeing Sun is attested by name with the Rivers and the Earth, along with the powers that judge the perjured in another state; and so again elsewhere associated with Jove, are Earth, Sun, and the Erinnyes (Hom. I. iii. 276; xix. 259; xv. 204). When Poseidon, in the Iliad, hesitates to defer to the positive commands of Zeus, Iris reminds him that there is a superior sanction for

the authority of his elder-there are the Erinnyes to be reckoned with-and he gives in at once. There is here a sense of sanctity, deepening as it renounces the figments of poetry, and recurs to the unornamented suggestions of nature.'

This was Greek Pantheism or Polytheism-a human, a gentile, or ethnic form of anxious thought, which led heathen Greeks of creeds outworn to build temples of vain beauty and offer prayer in them; and which has identically the same effect in the Christian polytheism of the south of Europe now. S. John Damascenus, we believe, formulated the distinctions of dulia, hyperdulia, and latria, as degrees of devotion. The same kind of distinction had existed in the mind of every practical son of Cecrops. He thought on the nymphs as lovely unseen playfellows, who would help him in his farm, but would be too much for him if he beheld them. He feared to meet Pan, 'to whose music the nymphs dance, but who has a cry in him which will drive all men distracted.' He thought on Zeus homerically, and laughed at the jovial old dynast; but for all that he thought of the Oslov, the Divinity, in his need, and in temptations. A great and mighty One saw him, who ruled, rewarded, and punished, and was one with Fate, Erinnyes, and Eumenides.

This Unity of Divine qualities, of the good in many manifestations, and however represented by the human soul in its own image, is the core of Greek monotheism and of Pheidian art. All these Agalmata symbolised the qualities or the omnipresence of Divinity. And here we may note a correspondence of judgment between two very different authorities which is, to say the least, remarkable and satisfactory. Professor Zeller's chosen period for the full development of the monotheistic idea in the Greek mind synchronises exactly with Professor Ruskin's exactly-just choice of the central period of Attic art from the sixth to the fourth century B.C. Zeus of Olympia was finished in 433, the last great work of the days of glory, ἐπεὶ ὕστερόν γε καὶ πᾶν, ὡς εἰπεῖν, τὸ Ἑλληνι KÒV EKιvýon. He was made of gold and ivory, by Pheidias of Athens, and was thought to show forth Zeus and give him glory in the eyes of Greece, i.e., make Greece understand him better. He was not a fetiche of talismanic ivory; and nobody expected him to thunder or shake his sceptre, or wink or shed tears, or cure rheumatism. This gold and ivory symbol meant natural religion, or polytheism reduced at length, and by seeking, to the ideal of Unity.

1 Thuc. ii. 82.

So, at least, it may have seemed to Socrates and Plato, and also to such men of keen intellect and good life as are represented by old Cephalus in the Republic. The best Greeks alone could reach this, it may be ; and here an excellent remark has been made, that whereas monotheism was developed late and imperfectly by the best heathen intellects, the Hebrew race, of inferior acuteness and brilliancy, are found in full possession of it at a far earlier date, which confirms the assertion of the sacred records of Hebrew history, that He, the One God, gave Himself to be known of a peculiar people by revelation.

The mind of Æmilius Paulus naturally went back to Homer, or to all he may have read of Homer, when he saw the Agalma of Elis; and he said that Pheidias had given him a new ideal of that worthy deity, best described as no better than he ought to be; but Pheidias had meant, or wished to symbolise, more than that. All the highest teaching of Greece had long kept idealising Zeus into loftier and purer conceptions; and 'the higher he was placed morally, the more completely mythological anthropomorphism disappeared be-fore the idea of a perfect Being, and so much the more did monotheism take the place of Polytheism.' Monotheism and the moral ideal are necessarily connected. Morality is one; for it is a standard of life given and upheld by the one Judge of mankind. The higher your notion of Zeus is, the farther he is withdrawn from any mixture of human evil, the more definite and real a personage he becomes to you personally. The better worth knowing about he is, the more he has to do with you; the more idea you have of a personal judge of right and wrong, the more you understand the working of that indisputable factor, your own conscience.

The philosophers were not slow to attack both plurality and anthropomorphism, more or less directly, but were not necessarily brought into contact at first with the popular mythology. Their systems did not grow up like the Christian, in the service of Theology, with the immediate desire to defend or purify religious belief. The first great and disinterested sophists of Truth simply wanted to find out about the nature of things. They were in many respects like our modern masters of physical science, except that they did not know nearly so much, and generally believed rather more. But like them, beginning with physical speculation (though without a proper inductive method), they were pushed by the necessities of thought into Metaphysic, and therefore into Theology. They sought to rise above nature and themselves, and found they were seeking after God. They did rise to a certain height,

and there the thought of Him came to them. They did penetrate to a certain depth, and there the psychology of their own souls and the theology of their Maker were about them at once, behind and before. Meтà Tà quoikά; when your physics are done with, what does that mean for all of us? It is more than the accidental name of Aristotle's treatise. To stout hearts and far-seeing minds it means, when you die, and earthly or natural things are nothing to you any more. Then, indeed, a metaphysic, that which comes after sensible nature, is down upon Greek or Goth, Anaxagoras or Tyndall. And as surely as death brings the soul into contact with the metaphysic unseen, so surely the thought of both will witness to and wrestle with every soul, although the soul deny its own existence. We do, in fact, find that same groping sense of Eternal Right, which S. Paul called feeling after a God not distant, in many sincere professors of a high morality without Him in our own days. If we had no other ground for charitable thoughts of them, we may think that to have been educated in Denial is as bad for a man, and as hard on him, as growing up under the natural religion of Athens. All have read the Life of John Stuart Mill, and few, perhaps, will think him more to blame for the state of his spiritual convictions as a grown man, than Pericles or Pheidias. An atmosphere of atheism, terror, and pedantry is worse to live in than the frank heathenism and free air of the Pnyx and the Parthenon.

For the parallel testimony of poetry to the monotheistic idea; of the parallel degeneracy of Greek morality, art, and poetry; of its causes, especially in Athenian society, we may perhaps be allowed space in a future review. The present has reached quite a sufficient length.

ART. VI.-SPIRITUAL NEEDS OF INVALIDS.

1. Thoughts on Invalid Life. (Winchester, 1879.)

2. Notes on the Care of the Sick. By the Rev. A. BRINCKMAN. (London, 1879.)

3. An Invalid's Day. (London, 1877.)

WHAT became of the sick in the earlier times of the Church? It is a question which suggests itself to those who have made any researches into ancient offices, or into those of other