regular and known machinery for bringing into practical. communication with each other parties that, but for this machinery, were too remote to have learned their reciprocal wants. All people of rank and distinction, throughout Greece and its dependencies or adjacencies, kept up a respectful intercourse with Delphi; and consequently that great bank had the advantage of what might be called official reports from every corner of Hellas, and (if need arose) of reports circumstantially minute. Was it a high-born lady with ample dowry leading a solitary life because no suitor of corresponding pretensions existed in her own neighbourhood? The Oracle had a ready means for transmitting this intelligence to a remote quarter, where it would tell effectually. Was a call for colonisation becoming clamorous in some particular region? What more beneficial, or what more easy, than for the Oracle to forward this news by its own channels to a tract of country labouring (through causes casual or local) under an excess of pauperised population? Or, if a chieftain in the north were commencing a sumptuous palace, what should hinder the Oracle from forwarding that intelligence to the architects and decorators of the south? Mr. Carlyle's impeachment of Poor-law arrangements, on the ground that they accumulated ploughs and ploughmen in one province, whilst the arable lands needing to be ploughed all lay in some other province, would hardly have existed under Delphi, or not as any subject of complaint where the remedy was so prompt. The brief summary of Delphic administration was this-It moved by secret springs: not being visibly or audibly displayed, it irritated no jealousies. Appealing to no coercive powers, but purely to moral suasion, it provoked no refractoriness. Combining with the very highest of religious influences that Hellas recognised, it insured a docile and a reverential acceptance for all its directions. And, finally, because this great Delphic establishment held in its hands the hidden reins from every province, therefore it was that out of universal Greece, as a body of wants, powers, slumbering activities, and undeveloped resources, Delphi would have constructed, and did construct so far as her influence escaped the thwarting of cross currents, a system of political watch-work where all the parts and movements played into a common

centre. We must remember that Greece, after all, and allowing for every class of drawbacks, was really the first region upon earth in which (as in our present Christendom) there had formed itself a system of international law, and fixed modes of diplomacy. Compare her, this Greece, with the wretched voluptuaries of Southern Asia, from Western Arabia and Persia to Eastern China, no matter when, whether before or after Mahomet. Greece, though beginning with institutions as to women too dangerously Asiatic, was yet never emasculated. Men, aspiring men, were what she still produced. And much of this great advantage she owed apparently to that diffusive Delphic influence through which she nourished and expanded her unity, all parts existing for the sake of each, and each for all, in a degree of which no vestige was ever exhibited by the crazy and effeminate policy of any Asiatic state.

Now, therefore, having laid the foundations of a road for safe footing, let me march to my conclusion. The conclusion of the Fathers was the wildest of errors, into which they were misled by the most groundless of preconceptions. They started with the assumption that there was an essential hostility between Christianity and the primary pretensions of Oracles, consequently of Delphi as the supreme Oracle. And one result of this startling error was that they exacted as a debt from Christianity that expression of hostility which, except in a Patristic romance, never had any real existence. The Fathers regarded it as a duty of Christianity to destroy Oracles; and, holding that baseless creed, some of them went on to affirm, in mere defiance of history, that Christianity had destroyed Oracles. But why did the Fathers fancy it so special a duty of the Christian faith to destroy Oracles? Simply for these two reasons: viz. that

1. Most falsely they supposed prophecy to be the main function of an Oracle; whereas it did not enter as an element into the main business of an Oracle by so much as once in a thousand responses.

2. Not less erroneously they assumed this to be the inevitable parent of a collision with Christianity. For all prophecy, and the spirit of prophecy, they supposed to be a regal prerogative of Christianity,-sacred, in fact, to the true

faith by some alienable right. But no such claim is anywhere advanced in the Scriptures. And even a careless reader will remember one conspicuous case where a prophet of known hostility to the Hebrew interest and the Hebrew faith, and for that reason invoked and summoned to curse the children of Israel, is nevertheless relied on as a fountain of truth by the Hebrew leaders.

But suppose that there really were any such exclusive pretension to prophecy on behalf of Christianity: what is prophecy? The Patristic error is here intolerable. In order to make any comparison as to such a gift between the Greek Oracles and Christianity, we must at least be talking of the same thing; whereas nothing can be more extensively distinguished from the vaticinations of the Pagan Oracle than prophecy as it is understood in the Bible. St. Paul is continually referring in his Epistles to gifts of prophecy: but does any man suppose this apostle to mean gifts as to the faculty of prediction? Nobody, of all whom St. Paul was addressing, pretended to any qualifications of that nature. A prophet in the Bible nowhere means a foreseer or predicter. It means a person endowed with exegetic gifts: that is, with powers of interpretation applicable to truth hidden, or truth imperfectly revealed. All profound and scriptural truth may be regarded as liable to misinterpretation, because originally lying under veils of shadowy concealment, many and various. He who removes any one of these varying obscurations he who displays in his commentaries the gifts of an exegetes or interpreter -is, in St. Paul's sense, a prophet. Now, among these obscuring causes, one is Time: some features of what is communicated may chance to be hidden by the clouds which surround a distant future; and in that sole case, one case amongst hundreds, the prophet coincides with the predicter. But in the vast majority of cases prophecy means the power of interpretation, or of commentary and practical extension, applied to scriptural doctrines: a sense not only irrelevant to the Oracles, but without purpose, or value, or meaning, to any Pagan whatever. So that competition from that quarter was the idlest of chimeras. Prophecy, therefore, in any sense ever contemplated by a Christian writer, could not be violated or desecrated by any rival pretensions of Paganism, such as

the Fathers feared, inasmuch as all such pretensions on the part of Paganism were blank impossibilities.

That falsification, therefore, of historic facts, by which the Fathers attempted to varnish and mystify the absolute indifference of Christianity to the Oracles, falls away spontaneously when the motive upon which it moved is exposed as frivolous and childish. Cleared from these gross misrepresentations of the ill-informed, Oracles appear to have fulfilled a most important mission. As rationally might Christianity be supposed hostile to post-offices, or jealous of mail steamers, as indisposed to that oracular mission of which the noble purpose, stated in the briefest terms, was to knit the extremities of a state to its centre and to quicken the progress of civilisation.

Why the Oracles really decayed I presume arose thus:I have already noticed their loss of high political functions. This loss, though never intentionally offered as a degradation, not the less had that result. During that long course of generations when princes or republics needed the co-operation of Oracles that possessed worlds of local information, and that furnished the sanctions of heavenly authority, not at all less than the Oracles needed martial protection, the two powers were seen, or were felt obscurely, acting always in harmony and coalition. With us in Great Britain a man acquires the title of Right Honourable by entering the Privy Council as a member. Some honour, or some distinction for the ear or for the eye, corresponding to this, no doubt settled upon the high officers at Delphi. They were probably regarded as honorary members of the national council that in one shape or other advised and assisted the ruler of every state having established relations with Delphi. But these flattering distinctions would cease, or would become mere titular honours, when Delphi lost her connexion, and her right of suggestion, and her "voice potential," with the supreme government of her own land. With us, when a

man has been presented to the sovereign, he obtains (or used to obtain), from the Lord Chamberlain, a sort of certificate which said "Mr. Thingamby is known at the Court of St. James": whether known for any good was civilly suppressed; and this potent recognition enabled Thingamby to

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VOL. VII

present himself as one having on a wedding garment, and admissible at any other court or courtlet whatsoever, except that of Ashantee. Let the reader honestly confess that he envies Thingamby. Now, it is not improbable that the high ministers at Delphi had a power equal to the Lord Chamberlain's of certifying on behalf of any man going on his travels, were it Pythagoras or Solon, Herodotus or Plato, Anacharsis or Thingamby (every one of whom was a traveller), that the bearer is favourably known at Delphi. In the days of Delphic grandeur such an introduction would bear a high value at all the surrounding courts; and this value would be multiplied in that age when the successors of Alexander had founded thrones stretching all the way from the Oxus to the Nile. But, after the Roman conquest of Greece and of Macedon, all this would collapse. A large field of economic services would still remain open to the temple; but the atmosphere of sanctity, with the faith in supernatural co-operation, would have suffered a shock. And the local agents, that once in every district had emulously disputed the glory of ranking in the long retinue of the god, and of the great lady seated on the tripod, would no longer find a sufficient indemnification for their labours in the glory of the service. Delphi, like the "Times" newspaper, would have to pay its agents; and the clouded splendours of the Delphic shrine and temple would reflect themselves, as years went on, in the dilapidations of the town. Delphi, the city, must have been the creation of Delphi, the oracular temple; and the dismantlings of both must have gone on under the same impulses, and through corresponding stages; so that either would reflect sufficiently to the other its own ruins and superannuations. When earthly grandeurs, however, were gone, there would still survive a large arrear of humbler and economic services, by which a decent revenue might be secured. And the true reason why the ceasing of Oracles was so variously timed and so vaguely dated is to be looked for precisely in this variable declension of humbler ministrations, through local ebbs and flows in casual advantages of position. The case recalls to my eye a scene exhibited in certain streets of London very early on a summer morning nearly forty-four years ago. It was high summer, in the