of honour (whether as a writer or a reader) shrinks from dealing with any case to which they do really adhere; such a case belongs to the province of police courts, not of literature. But, in the ancient apparatus of the Oracles, although frauds and espionage did certainly form an occasional resource, the artifices employed were rarely illiberal in their mode, and frequently ennobled by their motive. As to the mode, the Oracles had fortunately no temptation to descend into any tricks that could look like "thimble-rigging"; and, as to the motive, it will be seen that this could never be dissociated from some regard to public or patriotic objects in the first place,—to which if any secondary interest were occasionally attached, that could rarely descend so low as even to an ordinary purpose of gossiping curiosity, but never to a mercenary purpose of fraud. My views, however, on this phasis of the question will speedily speak for themselves.

Meantime, pausing for one moment to glance at the hypothesis of the Fathers, I confess myself to be scandalised by its unnecessary plunge into the ignoble. Many sincere Christian believers have doubted altogether of any evil spirits as existences warranted by Scripture, that is, as beings whose principle was evil ("evil, be thou my good "); others, again, believing in the possibility that spiritual beings had been (in ways unintelligible to us) seduced from their state of perfection by temptations analogous to those which had seduced man, acquiesced in the notion of spirits tainted with evil, but not therefore (any more than man himself) essentially or causelessly malignant. Now, it is well known, and, amongst others, Eichhorn (Einleitung in das alte Testament) has noticed the fact,—which will be obvious, on a little reflection, to any even unlearned student of the Scriptures who can throw his memory back through a real familiarity with those records, that the Jews derived their obstinate notions of fiends and demoniacal possessions (as accounting even for bodily affections) entirely from their Chaldean captivity. Not before that great event in Jewish history, and, therefore, in consequence of that great event, were the Jews inoculated with this Babylonian, Persian, and Median superstition. If Eichhorn and others are right, it follows

that the elder Scriptures, as they ascend more and more into the purer atmosphere of untainted Hebrew creeds, ought to exhibit an increasing freedom from all these modes of demoniacal agency. And accordingly so we find it. Messengers of God are often concerned in the early records of Moses; but it is not until we come down to Post-Mosaical records-Job, for example (though that book is doubtful as to its chronology), and the Chronicles of the Jewish Kings (whether Judaic or Israelitish)—that we first find any allusion to malignant spirits. As against Eichhorn, however, though readily conceding that the agency is not often recognised, I would beg leave to notice that there is a threefold agency of evil, relatively to man, ascribed to certain spirits in the elder Scriptures: viz., 1, of misleading (as in the case of the Israelitish king seduced into a fatal battle by a falsehood originating with a spiritual being); 2, of temptation; 3, of calumnious accusation directed against absent parties. It is not absolutely an untenable hypothesis that these functions of malignity to man, as at first sight they appear, may be in fact reconcilable with the general character of a being not malignant, and not evil in any sense, but simply obedient to superior commands: for none of us supposes, of course, that a "destroying angel" must be an evil spirit, though sometimes appearing in a dreadful relation of hostility to all parties (as in the case of the chastising angel who checked his wrath at the threshing - floor of Araunah). In commemoration of that merciful intervention from heaven, this threshing-floor was subsequently purchased by the national treasury, and solemnly appropriated to the use of the First Temple, for which it furnished the foundation area. The Temple itself, therefore, built by Solomon 1000 years before Christ, became a monumental record of that suspended wrath which uttered its departing thunders over the homestead of Araunah. But surely the Holy Temple would not have been suffered to commemorate any act of an impure spirit. Waiving, however, all these speculations, one thing is apparent, that the negative allowance, the toleration granted to these later Jewish modes of belief by our Saviour, can no more be urged as arguing any positive sanction to such existences (to demons in the bad sense) than his toleration

of Jewish errors and conceits in questions of science. Once for all, it was no purpose of his mission to expose errors in matters of pure curiosity, and in speculations not moral, but exclusively intellectual.

To leave the Patristic Literature, and to state my own views on the final question argued by Van Dale—“ What was the essential machinery by which the Oracles moved?" -I shall inquire, subdividingly,

1. What was the relation of the Oracles (and I would wish to be understood as speaking particularly of the Delphic Oracle) to the religious credulity of Greece?

2. What was the relation of that same Oracle to the absolute truth?

3. What was its relation to the public welfare of Greece? Into this trisection I shall decompose the coarse unity of the question presented by Van Dale and his Vandals, as though the one sole "issue" that could be sent down for trial before a jury were the probabilities of fraud and gross swindling. It is not with the deceptions or collusions of the Oracles, as mere matters of fact, that we in this age are primarily concerned, but with those deceptions as they affected the contemporary people of Greece. It is important to know whether the general faith of Greece in the mysterious pretensions of Oracles were unsettled or disturbed by the several agencies at work that naturally tended to rouse suspicion : such, for instance, as these four which follow :— -1, eminent instances of scepticism with regard to the assumed prophetic vision of any Oracle, from time to time circulating through Greece in the shape of bons mots; or, 2,—which silently amounted to the same virtual expression of distrust-refusals (often more speciously wearing the name of neglects) to consult the proper Oracle on some hazardous enterprise of general notoriety and interest; 3, cases of direct failure in the event as understood to have been predicted by the Oracle, not unfrequently accompanied by tragical catastrophes to the parties misled by this erroneous construction of the Oracle ; 4, (which is, perhaps, the climax of the exposures possible under the superstitions of Paganism) a public detection of known oracular temples doing business on a considerable scale as accomplices with felons.

Modern appraisers of the oracular establishments are too commonly in all moral senses anachronists. I hear it alleged with some plausibility against Southey's portrait of Don Roderick, though otherwise conceived in a spirit proper for bringing out the whole sentiment of his pathetic situation,1 that the King is too Protestant, and too evangelical after the model of 1800, in his modes of penitential piety. The poet, in short, reflected back, upon one who was too certain in the eighth century to have been the victim of dark popish superstitions, his own pure and enlightened faith. But the anachronistic spirit in which modern sceptics react upon the Pagan Oracles is not so elevating as the English poet's. Southey reflected his own superiority upon the Gothic Prince of Spain. But the sceptics reflect their own vulgar habits of mechanic and compendious office business upon the large institutions of the ancient Oracles. To satisfy them, the Oracle should resemble a modern coach-office-where undoubtedly you would suspect fraud, if the question, "How far to Derby?" were answered evasively, or if the grounds of choice between two roads were expressed enigmatically. But the To λogov, or mysterious indirectness of the Oracle, was calculated far more to support the imaginative grandeur of the unseen God, and was designed to do so, than to relieve the individual suitor in a perplexity that was seldom of any capital importance. In this way every oracular answer operated upon the local Grecian neighbourhood in which it circulated as one of the impulses which, from time to time, renewed the sense of a mysterious involution in the invisible powers, as though they were incapable of direct correspond

1 What was this situation? Early in the eighth century after Christ (let us say A.D. 707), Roderick the Goth, King of Spain, taking an infamous advantage from his regal power, was said to have violated the person of Count Julian's daughter- by some historians called Cava. Her father, as the deadliest mode of vengeance open to him, had called in the Mahometan invaders of the Barbary coasts. Roderick, by a deep prophetic instinct, read in vision the desolation which his own perfidious atrocity had let loose upon Spain, his country, and Christianity, his faith, through eight hundred years; descended into hell by means of despair, re-ascended by penitence to earth, fought one mighty battle for the Cross, was beaten, and immediately vanished from earth, leaving no traces for deciphering his mysterious fate.

ence or parallelism with the monotony and slight compass of human ideas. As the symbolic dancers of the ancients, who narrated an elaborate story "saltando Hecubam" or "saltando Loadamiam," interwove the passion of the advancing incidents into the intricacies of the figure-something in the same way it was understood by all men that the Oracle did not so much evade the difficulty by a dark form of words as he revealed his own hieroglyphic nature. All prophets, the true equally with the false, have felt the instinct for surrounding themselves with the majesty of darkness. Look at the Hebrew prophets never once are they direct and without obliquity. And in a religion like the Pagan, so deplorably meagre and starved as to most of the draperies connected with the mysterious and sublime, we must not seek to diminish its already scanty wardrobe. But let us pass from speculation I have imagined several cases giving a shock to the general Let me review them.

to illustrative anecdotes. which might seem fitted for Pagan confidence in Oracles.

The first is the case of any memorable scepticism published in a pointed or witty form, as when Demosthenes avowed his suspicions "that the Oracle was Philippising." This was about 344 years B.C. Exactly one hundred years earlier, in the 444th year B.C., or the locus of Pericles, Herodotus (then forty years old) is universally supposed to have read (which for him was to publish) his History. In this work two insinuations of the same kind occur: during the invasion of Darius the Mede (about 490 B.C.) the Oracle was charged with Medising; and in the previous period of Pisistratus (about 555 B.C.) the Oracle had been almost convicted of Alemæonidising. The Oracle concerned was the same―viz. the Delphic-in all three cases. In the case of Darius, fear was the ruling passion; in the earlier case, a near selfinterest, but not in a base sense selfish. The Alcmæonidæ, an Athenian house hostile to Pisistratus, being exceedingly rich, had engaged to rebuild the ruined temple of the Oracle, and had fulfilled their engagements with a munificence outrunning the letter of their professions, particularly with regard to the quality of marble used in facing or "veneering" the front elevation. Now, these sententious and rather witty expressions gave wings and buoyancy to the public