2. OFF THE SKELLIGS. By Jean Ingelow. Part XV., Saint Pauls, 3. CHARLES JAMES LEVER, Macmillan's Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, Saturday Review, POETRY. 706 | HUMAN Life, MISCELLANY. THE DEATH OF COUNT MELUN, 768 768 THE ISLAND OF JAMAICA, PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS. remitted directly to the Publishers. the LIVING AGE will be punctually for. warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club THE LIVING AGE with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. From Chambers's Journal A SHIPWRECK. STEADILY blows the north-east wind, Now she strikes on the rocks! No aid Can reach her there; she must tumble and roll, And the harbour flag blows straight from the Till at last a great third wave will come, mast; And the sailors lounge and look on the pier, Yonder the cloud-rack lowers and glooms, And eat her up, and ingulf the whole. There they are lashing themselves to the spars! And you have to shout the thing that you say. Here are the splinters on every rock, The distant fleet of white-sailed ships Come hastening landward with wet black As they lean to the push of the gusty wind, tides. The spumy froth of the rock-vexed waves For hedges and hillsides far inland. The sea-birds dip and wheel in the air, And search the surges with greedy eyes; They hang with tremulous wings on the brink, Then away on the blast with their shrill sad cries. Yonder the people crowd to the cliff, Where the long gray grass is flattened and bent; As the stress of the hurricane passes by, Far down below are the cruel rocks, All black and slippy with black sea-weed; And pits profound, where the whirlpools run, For ever revolving with hideous speed. How the ships come! Let them come, poor barks! Here is the harbour quiet and still; Once entered, the weary crew can sleep, And dream of their home without fear of ill. How the ships come! What's that? A helm And up in the rigging the crew run fast. On she comes for the rocks! O men! O maids and mothers! O daughters and wives! You are sitting at home by the hearth-fire warm, And the sea has a hold of your loved ones' lives! All o'er the beach, and all round the bay. From The Contemporary Review. AN ESSAY IN THE COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF PART II. THE BELIEF IN GREECE. (a) i. INTRODUCTORY. successive phases. Here, however, two may be specified: (1) the national mythology crystallized into permanent form before the national mind attained to full religious consciousness; (2) religious thought did not develop within, but without, this mythology. The Greek mind lived long in the mythical and imaginative stages. Centuries THE belief in Immortality, while a pre-after the Indians and Iranians had elabeminent product of Greek thought, was almost unknown to Greek religion. The mythology believed and the worship practised by the people neither awed by the fear, nor cheered with the hope, of a future life. The gods of Olympos ruled the present; death was the limit of their dominion. In the later mythology which grew up within and around the mysteries, the gods of the underworld distributed rewards and punishments to the dead, but they exercised no áctual government over the living. While of all ancient peoples the Greeks had the profoundest faith in the reign of moral Law, no ancient people seemed so little conscious of any religious connection between the present and a future life. Greece was in this respect a contrast to almost all the other Indo-European nations. The Iran ians founded on their ethical dualism a positive and intelligible theory of immortality a theory which, passing first into Judaism and then into Christianity, has played so great a part in the religious history of the world. The Teutonic tribes so conceived the future as to reduce death to a "home-going," "a return to the Father." The Kelts believed in a metempsycl.osis which made the future'life as active as the present. The Indian Aryans evolved, as already seen, from their early naturalism a religion whose distinctive characteristic was the continued existence of the transmigrating soul. But the Greek, whose conception of life was the most ethical, whose religious faith was the most beautiful, believed a religion which left him to live and die without the hope of an immortal hereafter. The causes of this peculiarity in the religious development of Greece can be fully ascertained only by a minute study of its (a) Living Age, No. 1466. but the more orated great religious systems, the Hellenes remained in the simplest nature-worship. Their manner of life had been unfavourable to the birth and growth of religious thought, but conducive to the formation of brave and resolute character. The hero was more to the Greek than to the Indian; the god more to the Indian than the Greek. In the Vedic hymns, the theological side is the predominant, but in the Homeric poems, apart from the general idea of the whole, the subordinate (a) — the divine action the mere background of the human. The first are religions; the second secular. The Rishis composed their hymns to praise the gods; but Homer made his poems to glorify the heroes. The Vedic mythology is the younger, but the more religious; the Homeric the older, mythical. The Hindu hymns show a dependence of man God, an abasement of self, a need of priestly mediation and sacrifice such as the Hellenic epics do not reveal: yet these, as later, are more perfect expressions of the Greek than those are of the Indian mind. The latter are more individual, the former more national. Homer and Hesiod, as Preller says, are only "mythical collective names."(b) Behind them lie centuries of mythological development: in them the results are concentrated, co-ordinated, and combined. The Hellenic faith thus crystallized at the point where the mythical deposit was greatest. The natural elements in it were many; the subjective and spiritual were few. The myths of the instinctive had been translated into the mythology of the imaginative stage, but not into the beliefs of the reflective. on The Greek Theogony remained, on the whole, as Homer and Hesiod had made (a) Welcker, Griechis. Gotterlehre, ii. p. C9. (b) Griechis, Mythologie, i. p. 14. it; (a) received mythical developments or unmoved mover of all things. (a) The additions, but did not change its charac- superstitious or the politic might consult ter. But while it stood still, mind grew, the oracle at Delphi, but the sage sought became conscious of many things that did within himself the only voice he could not lie in the old naturalism, even as poet- obey. Religion and religious thought had ically transfigured. Religion degenerated thus not only parted company, but fallen into a beautiful accessory to a singularly into violent antagonism. Devout men, no rich and genial life; thought became the longer able to be religious in the old sense, actual ethical and religious Teacher. (b) because religious in a deeper, had to disThe separation or antagonism of religion tinguish between Religion as mythical, and thought is, indeed, a misfortune, pre- civil, and philosophical.(b) The old reeminently so for the religion; for when it ligion, crystallized at the imaginative ceases to lead the national thought, it falls stage, could satisfy only those who rebehind the nation,- crystallizes only to be mained there: those who had passed behopelessly pulverized. And so ancient yond it had to create in its stead a reGreece experienced. The myths delighted ligion of religious thought. the fine fancy of the people, the religious festivals gave to the lighter side of the national character a sphere in which to play; but the higher functions of religion passed to poetry and philosophy. If in the days of Pausanias the old faith still lived in quiet rural spots, it had died centuries before in the centres of intellectual activity. The Exegetæ might repeat and explain in the temples the old myths, but the true divines were poets, like Pindar, in whose odes the ancient mythology was exalted and transfigured.(c) Zeus might still in the popular traditions thunder from Olympos, or wage an unequal contest with his subtle and termagant Queen, but in the hands of Eschylos he had been raised into a diviner deity. (d) The people might believe that, once "immortal gods and mortal men partook of a common table, and lived under a common roof; "(e) but philosophy had in Plato sublimed God into the supreme good, which only purified reason could apprehend.(ƒ) Priests and people might imagine the gods to be animated by passion and pleased by sacrifice, but speculation had resolved deity into the The peculiar order and conditions of religious development in Greece thus made the belief in immortality not so much the property of its religion as of its thought. Had thought developed under the mythicoreligious forms until it had changed their matter, in other words, had the religion grown with the mind of the nation and passed with it from the mythical into the reflective stage, then our belief would have risen as a religious doctrine, shaped and enforced by religious sanctions. But, as it was, the poets became the true priests of Greece, (c) embodying in Epic or Ode or Tragedy the ideas of Moral Law and Order and Judgment; the philosophers her true prophets, revealing mind in Nature, the supreme Good within, above and before man. So our belief, ignored by the popular religion, sought recognition and development at the hands of the actual priests and prophets. It rose in answer to the demand first of the religious and moral instincts, and then of the reason. The answer to the former was given at first crudely in the mysteries, then clearly and grandly in the lyrical and tragic poets; the answer to the latter in the nobler and more spiritual philosophies. The mysteries were attempts to supplement the deficiencies of the national religion; the philosophies to reach ultimate and universal truth. The belief, as expressed in the (a) Aristotle, Metaph. xi. vii. 2-6. (b) Plutarch, De Plac. Philos. i. 6; Amator. 18; M. Scævola apud Augus. De Civit. Dei, iv. 27; Varro ib iv. 5. (c) Welcker, Griechis. Gotterlehre, ii. 66. first, witnesses only to a need felt alike by impersonal in the highest sense mirror Greek and barbarian, but as expressed in the faith, not of a man, but of an age. the second, to a demand made by the con- For the Greeks even more than for us, the structive reason at its best. The myste- significant point was the nationality of the ries were in their use and meaning nation- poems, not the individuality of the poet. al, significant only for a land whose public The doctrine of a future state exhibited religion knew no future state; but the in the Iliad and Odyssey was the doctrine philosophies and their results have a uni-held by the then Hellenic peoples. It was versal importance, have helped and still not peculiar to the man Homer the help to shape the faith of the Christian poet's own doctrine "not only a defect in world. his system of mythology, but a striking Our belief thus unfolded in Greece under eccentricity of his genius."(a) The picconditions precisely the reverse of those ture he draws may be "for this world which existed in India, and as the condi- only, for the mortality, not for the immortions differed, so did the results. The tality of man,”(b) but the picture is faithprinciples which imply or lead to transmi- ful alike in its minute details and general gration were alien to the Greek spirit. It effect. Poems like the Homeric can fulfil had seized too firmly the notion of person- their end only so far as faithful pictures ality alike as to gods and men, of freedom, of the men and the religion they pourtray. of the ethical principles implied in the The heroes were always dear to the Helgovernment of the world and in the nature lenic heart, and had Homer given them a of man, to allow metempsychosis to obtain worse fate hereafter than the popular faith a permanent foothold on Grecian soil. did, his songs would have awakened cenThen, too, the belief in immortality was sure rather than applause. Certain disnever general in Greece.(a) A religion tinguished thinkers, indeed, showed small alone could have nationalized it. Beliefs mercy to the old blind poet. Pythagoras which depend on a given moral or meta- consigned him to punishment in Hades.(~) physical conception of the universe can Herakleitos would have expelled him and never be general. But while religion his songs from the national games. (d) alone can give universality, thought alone Plato banished him from his ideal Repubcan give perpetuity to a belief, adapt it to lic,(e) in great part because of his sins on changed times, defend it against novel this very point. (f) But, then, these men objections, reconcile it with new sciences judged the popular faith as severely as or fresh discoveries. If the faith in im- they judged Homer. What had pleased mortality has lived into this nineteenth his contemporaries offended the philosocentury, it is in great part because Christianity has been married to the spirit and many of the results of the higher Greek Philosophy. Our former paper led us to the study of a belief the antithesis of our own, but our present leads us to the study of one of its sources. While in Palestine the Messianic belief and hope, which blossomed into the Christ of Christianity, were putting forth their tender shoots, the faith in an immortal hereafter for man was seeking in Greece basis and form. The history of that search is what this paper attempts to give. phers. The first question to be discussed is this, Did the Homeric men believe that any part or element of man continued to exist after death? They believed that the soul, ux, so soon as death loosened its bands,(g) quitted the body by the (a) Colonel Mure, Crit. Hist. of Lang. and Lit. of Anc. Greece, i. p. 495. (b) Gladstone, Homer and the Homeric Age, ii. p. 3.3. (c) Hieronymus the Peripatetic, in Diogenes Laer. viii. 21. (d) Diog. Laer. ix. 1. (e) Repub. Bk, ii. vol. ii. 379, ff. (Steph.); Bk. x. vol. ii. 595. ff. See also the familiar lines of Xenophanes, which declare that what both Homer and Hesiod (f) Repub., Bk. iii. vol. ii. 386 (Steph.) |