been a prediction of Christ. Pope followed the tradition of his own Church; but even that Protestant of Protestants, his critic Samuel Johnson, does not seem for a moment to demur.

In all this, then, we see that the outstanding reason for the Christian interpretation of the eclogue was the fact that the child was not named. I have already expressed my conviction that Virgil had in mind a real child whose birth was expected. On the question what child it was whom Virgil meant, I can hardly do more than state the conclusion to which I was led some time ago; but I do so with confidence, because I find that it has been reached by several distinguished scholars independently of one another -Henry Nettleship, Mr. Warde Fowler, and one of the first of living German Latinists, Professor Skutsch, of Breslau.

The plain fact is, that the "father" who has given peace to the world can be no one but Octavian; the child who is to rule the world can have been in Virgil's mind no other than the heir to the empire, whose birth was expected in the latter half of 40 B. C., but who, in fact, was never born. To Octavian's bitter disappointment the child whom Scribonia bore him early in 39 B. C. was a girl, the Julia whose happiness was to be so deeply chequered by her father's dynastic designs. Scribonia was divorced upon the same day, having lost the one strong claim she might have possessed to the Emperor's gratitude. But Virgil's eclogue had been already published, and was itself, as an ante-natal ode must always be, more concerned with the father than the child, more indeed with the hopes of the world than with either father or child. To cancel the poem later on would have been to draw men's attention to Scribonia's misfortune and the Emperor's greatest perplexity, his want of an heir; it was therefore allowed to stand, enigma though it had become. Who could possibly have foretold the extraordinary influence upon the history of the

world with which this wise and gentle silence was destined to endue the poet? Or that the authority derived from it would be great enough to model for many centuries, if not for all time, the whole Christian conception of the after-world upon the Vision of Aeneas in the Sixth Book of the "Aeneid"?

If, then, we may at last leave behind us the controversies which have gathered round this particular fragment of Virgil's poetry, we come to a rather wider question. Do Virgil's other writings show anything like the hope of a Messiah; and if so, what kind of a Messiah do they foreshadow? We have seen that certain external coincidences with Christian tradition were merely accidental: is there beneath these any real harmony?

My contention may be briefly expressed in a few statements, some of which will be, I think, admitted at once. I believe that we may and must attribute to Virgil the conscious possession of certain ideas which may be roughly enumerated as follows:

1. That mankind was unbearably guilty, and in urgent need of regeneration.

2. That the establishment of the Empire was an epoch strangely favorable to some such ethical movement, and intended by Providence to introduce it.

3. That it was part of the duty of Rome to attempt the task.

4. That one special deliverer would be sent by Providence (or, in the "Aeneid," that a deliverer had already been sent) to begin the work.

5. That the work would involve suffering and disappointment; and that its essence lay in a new spirit, a new and more humane ideal.

Now if we can show that these were among the thoughts which moved Virgil, the admission will surely imply that, in the deepest and truest sense of the word, Virgil did "prophesy" the coming of Christianity. We should be justified in maintaining that he read the spiritual conditions of his time

with profound insight, and with not less profound hope declared that some answer would be sent to the world's need. How much more than these two gifts of insight and faith men may take to be involved in the conception of a prophet we need not consider; for we shall all agree that no great religion will ever be content with less; no mere mechanical foreknowledge has ever been or will ever be enough to make a man a great teacher of his fellows. In inquiring, therefore, into Virgil's teaching upon such points as have been suggested, we are not following some curious by-way of literary study; we are at the very heart of the central movement of history, and touching the deepest forces that have made and are making mankind.

Of the points enumerated, only the last (if even that) can be called in any sense new. The others hardly need to be justified, save that we must examine the first a little more closely if we wish to realize what kind of a world it was in which Virgil lived and wrote.

No one who is even superficially acquainted with the terrible century before Augustus (say from 133-31 B. C.) will doubt that the sufferings caused to the world by the "delirium" of its rulers had reached an unbearable pitch. In that period of time Italy had seen twelve separate civil wars, six of which had involved many of the provinces; a long series of political murders, beginning with the Gracchi, and ending with Caesar and Cicero; five deliberate, legalized massacres, from the drumhead court-martial, which sentenced to death three thousand supposed followers of Gaius Gracchus, to the second proscription dictated by Mark Antony. Men still spoke with a shudder of the butchery of seven thousand Samnite prisoners in the hearing of the assembled Senate, and the boy Virgil would meet many men who had seen the last act of the struggle with Spartacus and his army of escaped gladiators-six thousand prisoners nailed on crosses along the

whole length of the busiest road in Italy, from Rome to Capua. And the long record of the oppression of the provinces year by year under every fresh governor is hardly less terrible.

The chief causes of this chaos were the complete decay of civil control over the military forces of the empire; the growth of capitalism and the concentration of capital in the hands of the governing class at Rome; and the economic disorder springing from the methods of ancient warfare, especially the enormous growth of slavery and the depopulation of Italy. They are all summed up in that tremendous Ergo in the conclusion of the First Georgic, which attributes the miseries of mankind directly to the just wrath of heaven.

"Therefore it was that twice Philippi saw The clash of Roman hosts, both armed alike."

And the same evils have their place in the famous contrast between the peaceful toil of the farmer and the corrupt, reckless ambitions of political life, which closes the Second Georgic.

Hardly even Cicero, and certainly no other man of that generation, felt the shame of that corruption as did Virgil. With burning scorn he points to the roads by which the greatest men of his age had won their way to power.

"Some fret with laboring oars the treacherous sea

Eager to trade in slaughter, breaking through

The pomp and sentinels of ancient kings. This man will storm a town and sack

its homes,

To drink from alabaster, sleep in purple. His rival hoards up gold and broods alone On buried treasure. That man's dream

is set

On power to sway a crowd by eloquence, Or so command the acclaim of high and low

That vast assemblies at his coming vie To fill his ears with plaudits. There the victors

March proud of brothers' blood upon their hands;

Here steal the vanquished, torn from home and children,

To seek new fatherlands in alien skies."

And in the "Aeneid," who can forget the picture of the fall of Troy, with the concentrated pathos of its central

scene, the butchery of Polites before his father's and his mother's eyes, and of Priam himself upon the steps of the altar? And what is the tremendous machinery of punishment after death which the Sixth Book describes in the most majestic passage of all epic poetry but the measure of Virgil's sense of human guilt?

That the advent of the Empire, with the possibility which it offered of universal peace, seemed to Virgil the providential forerunner of even greater blessings, is clearly stated all through the "Aeneid." Not less clear is the part which he deemed the temporal power of Rome was to play in the new growth of society; and almost equally clear is the function he assigns to the idealized Augustus. In other words, few readers of Virgil will doubt the truth of the next three steps in my argument. One comment only may be here permitted, though it is so simple that at first sight it may seem almost trivial. Free communication between different parts of the world was made possible by the new roads, the new postal system, and the complete suppression of war by land and of piracy by sea; and these things, which marked the accession of Augustus, lasted through the first three centuries of the Empire-precisely the period in which Christianity grew to be a worldreligion. Has such freedom of travel ever been known again, I wonder, in any other three centuries of history? We may repeat a saying of Pope Leo the Great (440-461 A. D.), which anticipated many eloquent pages of Professor Freeman: "To the end that the fruit of God's unspeakable grace might be diffused throughout the world, the Divine Providence created beforehand the dominion of Rome."

We come now to my chief and last point, the character of the change that Virgil prophesied, and the spirit in which it was to be sought. And this will explain what may have seemed an inconsistency in the argument hitherto. How can you, it may be objected, see in Virgil's writings any antici

pation of a spiritual Messiah, when Virgil declares that Augustus is the deliverer he celebrates, that Augustus's work is to bring the great reformation? If Virgil was in the end content to accept as the Deliverer a personality so full of blots, can we interpret seriously his loftier predictions? But such a criticism is based on a misconception. Virgil was not content with the past or present weaknesses of the particular human being called Octavian; he condemns roundly, as we have seen, the violent deeds linked with his earlier career; what Virgil extols is the vast service which Augustus was visibly rendering to mankind, and the still higher service which seemed to lie in the new ideal of the Empire. In the passage devoted to Augustus in "Aeneid" vi., there is no mention of his triumphs in war; his first glory is the recall of the Golden Age of Justice; the last, his journeying in peace through the Empire, like the traveler Hercules who tamed the wild beasts of the forests, like Liber who yoked his tigers to the chariot of harvest-rejoicing.

What, then, was the new ideal? It was the conception of peace by forgiveness, of conciliation instead of punishment-in a word, the ideal of mercy. It was indeed for a part of this, that is, for just and humane government, that Cicero had lived and died; and from him Julius Caesar had learned, ere the end of his stormy career, the great political secret of forgetting offences; but the deeper ethical note, the human sympathy and tenderness of Virgil's appeal to the world, is all his own. In his great picture gallery of Roman heroes, nothing surely is more striking than the faint praise or open censure which he bestows on those who were merely great warriors, like King Tullus, the Tarquins, or Torquatus "of the cruel axe." Of Brutus, the first consul, who sentenced his own son to death for conspiring against the republic, Virgil's kindest word is infelix. Of Julius Caesar we have nothing but a lament for his share in

the Civil War, and a prophetic entreaty to him (in the lips of Anchises) to be the first to throw away the sword; and in this delicate, poetic homage to the great dictator, who shall say if there is more praise than regret?

But the fullest embodiment of this conception is in the second half of the "Aeneid." The story gives us a dramatic picture of the ideal ruler in conflict with the concrete forces of selfishness, passion and ignorance; a picture more profound than any that the art of Homer ever essayed to draw. and for that reason losing something of the fresh, boyish delight in stirring action that rings all through the battles on the Trojan plain. The whole fabric of Virgil's narrative, we can hardly doubt, is woven out of the impressions made upon him by the history of his time; but we can trace here only its central thread, a thread of gold. The thought that shines through the story is that no such warfare ought to be; that it is not the natural but the unnatural, or as Virgil calls it, the "impious" way of settling human questions; that reasonableness and pity are the greatest prerogatives of power.

For observe that Aeneas enters Italy not as an invader, but as a friend, no freebooter, but a pilgrim, seeking only to execute divine commands. The war is created by the powers of evil.

"Mischief, thou art afoot; take thou what course thou wilt," cries Shakespeare's Antony, as the mob he has excited rush off to murder the innocent Cinna. It is the same cruel, unscrupulous passion which Virgil portrays when Juno sends the Fury to incite the Latins to break faith with Aeneas. This is her commission.

"Thine is the power to embroil kind broth. ers' hands,

Sink homes in hatred, light the father's руге,

And make his freeborn children dread the lash.

A thousand names, a thousand mischiefs thou!

Wake all thy cunning: tear their solemn treaty,

Sow slanderous seed that blood may be the harvest,

And fill at once hearts, voices, hands with war."

To this spirit the brave, patient humanity of Aeneas is in perpetual contrast. In words it is expressed clearly in his speech to the Latin envoys: but the most striking, and, as one is tempted to say, the most un-Roman example, is his conflict with Lausus. Aeneas is pressing Mezentius hard: his young son Lausus rushes in to save his father, and proudly insists on continuing the combat himself when Mezentius has retreated. In vain Aeneas warns and tries to spare him; the Etruscans gather in support of Lausus, who will not be stayed until the spear of Aeneas has pierced his heart. How does Aeneas regard him then?

"But when he saw the dying look and face,

The face so wondrous pale, Anchises' son Uttered a deep groan, pitying him, and

stretched

His right hand forth, as in his soul there

rose

The likeness of the love he bore his sire. 'Poor boy! what guerdon for thy glorious deeds,

Say what, to match that mighty heart of thine

Shall good Aeneas yield thee? Those thine arms

Wherein thou gloried'st, keep them; and thyself,

If such desire can touch thee, to the shades

And ashes of thy fathers I restore." Then calls he the lad's followers, chiding them

For laggards, and uplifts their fallen lord, His comely boyish hair all stained with blood."

There is no such scene in Homer, nor, unless I mistake, in any other poetry before that of Christian chivalry. And it is thrown into high relief by the contrast with the savagery of Turnus, who allows no one but himself to slay the young prince Pallas, and cries, "Would that his father were here to see him fall."

In the crowning scene of the "Aeneid" this cruelty recoils on Turnus himself. As he lies defeated and begs for mercy, Aeneas stays his hand and is about to spare even Turnus.

But his eye falls on the baldric of Pallas which Turnus had taken for himself, and his grief for Pallas rouses again the temper of the warrior and the judge. Turnus must die. "Pallas," he cries, "Pallas slays thee," and plunged his sword full in Turnus's breast. "The chill of death relaxed his frame, and moaning his spirit fled indignant through the darkness." Moaning and indignant the defeated rebel ends his course; pitiful and indignant Virgil ends the story. The ruthless Turnus could not be trusted to live in the new era, but oh, the pity of his fall, the pity of his punishment.

Nowhere more exquisitely does Virgil "stretch out his hands in longing for the further shore," nowhere more touchingly express his sense of the incompleteness of the greatest human triumph, than by this last line of the "Aeneid," his last word to mankind. His hero has fought, has suffered long, has conquered; yet his conquest itself is cause for sorrow, because it shows

that the deeper enemy, the willfulness of human passion, has yet to be destroyed. Surely, if more than human breath ever moved in human utterance, some whisper at least of divine inspiration must be heard in such an ending to such a poem as this.

In Dante's words we think of Virgil as of "one who goes by night and bears a light behind him, and after him makes the people wise." It was what we call an accident that gave to the author of the Fourth Eclogue such authority among Christians that S teaching was studied as almost an integral part of the Christian revelation; but it was not an accident that his teaching was so profound, so pure, so merciful. Understood in the only way possible to the mind of the early centuries, that eclogue made him a direct prophet, and therefore an interpreter of Christ; and it is not the deepest students of Virgil who have thought him unworthy of that divine ministry.