lent good will-that law stands out in such dazzling contrast to the blackness of darkness that shrouds such deeds as we are compelled to recognize as the authorized and vaunted deeds of Romish cruelty throughout the blood-stained history of her iron rule, that we gaze with dismay upon the spectacle, and reject, on the strength of God's own word, the claim of the alien usurper to any part or lot in the matter of our faith and hope." 'By their works ye shall know them."

C. E.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD,

OR THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

No. VII.- -GREECE.

THE name of Ancient Greece is sufficient to call up strong emotions in the mind of every one who hears it; and it would be hard to decide, among the different classes of hearers, whose feelings are the deepest: the enthusiasm of the classic scholar,-the military admiration of the historian-the abhorrence of the severe moralist-or the pitying disgust of the Christian. And yet, who can doubt the justice of every one among these jarring sentiments? Of the Grecian learning and wisdom, I say nothing; being very much of the opinion of Patenit, the Egyptian priest.* But what ancient nation ever equalled Greece in all the witchery of art, and the poetry of intellect? What nation could vie with her arms in the field, or the individual bravery of her heroes ? In what other land of antiquity do we find a Leonidas or a Xenophon? a Homer or an Æschylus? Yet, as a set-off against all this array of glory, military and intellectual, was ever a people calling themselves civilized, degraded to so low a level of morality? What are we to think of a people among whom vice was no disgrace, but often an

* He told Solon that the Greeks were always children, and had neither antiquity nor original learning. Plato supported the same view.

honour and whose religious worship was a compound of absurdity, impurity and cruelty?

We may well doubt if the barbarities of the Egyptian mysteries were much softened by their importation into Greece; especially when we read Porphyry's quotation from Phylarchus ; who says, that, in former times, every Greek state made it a rule to sacrifice human victims when they marched against the enemy, in order to propitiate the gods in their favour. In Homer we see Achilles immolating twelve Trojan captives at the tomb of his beloved Patroclus. Men were sacrificed to the infernal gods, as well as to the manes of the dead; and every reader of history remembers the tremendous immolation of three hundred noble Lacedæmonians, with their king Theopompus, slaughtered by Aristomenes of Messene in honour of Jupiter. The horrible floggings inflicted on Spartan children, at the altar of Diana, are too celebrated to need description; as well as the inhuman flagellation of women in the feasts of Bacchus, so frequent throughout Greece.

Of the impurities of classic worship, I have no wish to speak but I may observe in passing, that these orgies of the god of wine were a convenient excuse for every species of riot and excess. Schlegel, in his Lectures on the History of Literature, ancient and modern, (quoted in the Quarterly Review, xlii.) says, 'In the festivals of Bacchus and the other frolicsome deities, every sort of freedom, even the wildest ebullitions of mirth and jollity were not only permitted, but were strictly in character, and formed in truth the consecrated ceremonial of the season. The fancy, above all things, a power by its very nature, impatient of restraint, the birth-right and peculiar possession of the poet, was on these occasions permitted to attempt the most audacious

heights, and revel in the wildest world of dreams, loosened for a moment from all those fetters of law, custom and propriety, which at other times, and in other species of writing, must ever regulate its exertion, even in the hands of poets.'

Such was the style of feeling and language on these occasions. The Bacchic processions consisted chiefly of drunken, frantic, half-clad masqueraders, who personated the god himself, his tutor Silenus, Satyrs, Fauns, Naiads, &c. &c. These seemly and decent assemblages terminated their march at some solitary mountain or desert, where they found full impunity for every mad and disgraceful excess. These were truly the "revellings, banquettings, and abominable idolatries," which St. Peter denominates "the will of the Gentiles." 1 Peter iv. 3.

Many of the other Greek deities were honoured in a similar manner; the feasts of Ceres, or Eleusinian mysteries, were little less disorderly than the Dionysia, and even these were not perhaps the worst. If we turn from the vices of Greek religion to its follies, and take one glance at the absurdity of the system before we consider its practical effects the altar in Delos, built by Apollo at the tender age of four years, of goat's horns, which adhered together without cement, or any visible bond-the ludicrous distortions of the inflated Pythoness—the gate of horn through which true dreams came down from heaven to earth-the divination by birds, swarms of bees, and thunder on the right-hand side of the sky-Ulysses raising ghosts by sacrificing black sheep in a ditch-and a thousand other proofs of the insensate folly of Paganism, crowd on our thoughts at the first mention of the subject.

Such was the religion of Greece; a compound of

absurdity, vice and barbarity, which it might puzzle the imagination of man to invent, had its memory been happily blotted out from the records of human nature. What effect must we expect such a system to produce on the moral condition of the people at large? I might safely leave the common sense of my readers to answer this question; but there exists a full reply, as concerns many points of morality, given by one of the Greeks themselves, and therefore not liable to be too severe. Thucydides, (Hobbes' Trans. l. iii. 198.) speaking of the earlier days of Socrates, says 'the received value of names imposed for significancy of things, began to be changed into arbitrary, for inconsiderate boldness was counted true-hearted manliness; prudent deliberation, a handsome fear; modesty, the cloak of cowardice; to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an ill act, or that could persuade another thereto, that never meant it, was commended. . . . . To be revenged was more in request, than never to have received injury. And for oaths, (when any were) of reconcilement, being administered in the present for necessity, they were of force to such as had otherwise no power : but upon opportunity, he that first durst, thought his revenge sweeter by the trust, than if he had taken the open way. For they did not only put to account the safety of that course, but having circumvented their adversary by fraud, they assumed to themselves withal a mastery in point of wit. There was wickedness on foot in every kind throughout all Greece, and sincerity (whereof there is much in a generous nature) was laughed at.'

This state of things was rendered still worse by the