and inquiring what it was that ruined them, or caused them to tremble, or to exhibit premonitory signs of coming declension, rarely or never amongst such causes has been found any open exhibition of violence. The gay mythologic religion of Greece melted away in silence; that of Egypt, more revolting to unfamiliarised sensibilities, more gloomy, and apparently reposing on some basis of more solemn and less allegoric reality, exhaled like a dream-i. e., without violence, by internal decay. I mean, that no violence existed where the religion fell, and there was violence where it did not. For even the dreadful fanaticism of the early Mahometan sultans in Hindostan, before the accession of Baber and his Mogul successors from the house of Timour, failed to crush the monstrous idolatries of the Hindoos. All false religions have perished by their own hollowness, and by internal decay, under the searching trials applied by life and the changes of life, by social mechanism and the changes of social mechanism, which wait in ambush upon every mode of religion. False modes of religion could not respond to the demands exacted from them, or the questions emerging. One after one they have collapsed, as if by palsy, and have sunk away under new aspects of society and new necessities of man which they were not able to face. Commencing in one condition of society, in one set of feelings, and in one system of ideas, they sank instinctively under any great change in these elements, to which they had no natural power of plastic self-accommodation. A false religion. furnished always a key to one subordinate lock; but a religion that is true will prove a master-key for all locks alike. This transcendental principle, through which Christianity transfers herself so readily from climate to

climate, from land to land, from century to century, from the simplicity of shepherds to the utmost refinement of philosophers, carries with it a corresponding necessity (corresponding, I mean, to such infinite flexibility) of an infinite development. The paganism of Rome, so flattering and so sustaining to the Roman nationality and pride, satisfied no spiritual necessity: dear to the Romans as citizens, it was at last killing to them as men.

* "From climate to climate:"-Sagacious Mahometans are often troubled and scandalised by the secret misgiving that, after all, their Prophet must have been an ignorant man. It is clear that the case of a cold climate had never occurred to him; and even a hot one was conceived by him under conditions too palpably limited. Many of the Bedouin Arabs complain of ablutions incompatible with their half-waterless position. Mahomet coming from the Hedjas, a rich tract, and through that benefit the fruitful mother of noble horses, knew no more of the arid deserts and Zaarrahs than do I. These oversights of its founder would have proved fatal to Islamism, had Islamism succeeded in producing a high civilisation.

THE PAGAN ORACLES.

IT is remarkable-and, without a previous explanation, it might seem paradoxical to say it-that oftentimes, under a continual accession of light, important subjects grow more and more enigmatical. In times when nothing was explained, the student, torpid as his teacher, saw nothing which called for explanation-all appeared one monotonous blank. But no sooner had an early twilight begun to solicit the creative faculties of the eye, than many dusky objects, with outlines imperfectly defined, began to converge the eye, and to strengthen the nascent interest of the spectator. It is true that light, in its final plenitude, is calculated to disperse all darkness. But this effect belongs to its consummation. In its earlier and struggling states, light does but reveal darkness. It makes the darkness palpable and "visible."* Of which we may see a sen

* Accordingly, some five-and-thirty years ago I attempted to show that Milton's famous expression in the "Paradise Lost," "No light, but rather darkness visible," was not (as critics imagined) a gigantic audacity, but a simple trait of description, faithful to the literal realities of a phenomenon (sullen light intermingled with massy darkness) which Milton had noticed with closer attention than the mob of careless observers. Equivalent to this is Milton's own expression, "Teach light to counterfeit a gloom," in "L'Allegro."

sible illustration in a gloomy glass-house, where the sullen lustre from the furnace does but mass and accumulate the thick darkness in the rear upon which the moving figures are relieved. Or we may see an intellectual illustration in the mind of the savage, on whose blank surface there exists no doubt or perplexity at all, none of the pains connected with half-knowledge; he is conscious of no darkness, simply because for him there exists no visual ray of speculation-no vestige of prelusive light.

Similar, and continually more similar, has been the condition of ancient history. Once yielding a mere barren crop of facts and dates, slowly it has been kindling of late years into life and deep interest under superior treatment. And hitherto, as the light has advanced, pari passu have the masses of darkness strengthened. Every question solved has been the parent of three new questions unmasked. And the power of breathing life into dry bones has but seemed to multiply the skeletons and lifeless remains; for the very natural reason-that these dry bones formerly (whilst viewed as incapable of revivification) had seemed less numerous, because everywhere confounded to the eye with stocks and stones, so long as there was no motive of hope for marking the distinction between them.

Amongst all the illustrations which might illuminate this truth, none is so instructive as the large question of PAGAN ORACLES. Every part, indeed, of the Pagan religion-the course, geographically or ethnographically, of its traditions, the vast labyrinth of its mythology, the deductions of its contradictory genealogies, the disputed meaning of its many secret "mysteries" [reλera-symbolic rites or initiations], all these have been submitted of late years to the scrutiny of glasses more powerful, applied

under more combined arrangements, and directed according to new principles more comprehensively framed. I cannot in sincerity affirm-always with immediate advantage. But, even where the individual effort may have been a failure as regarded the immediate object, rarely, indeed, has it happened that much indirect illumination did not result-which, afterwards entering into combination with other scattered currents of light, has issued in discoveries of value; although, perhaps, any one contribution, taken separately, had been, and would have remained, inoperative. Much has been accomplished, chiefly of late years; and, confining our view to ancient history, almost exclusively amongst the Germans-by the Savignys, the Niebuhrs, the Ottfried Muellers. And, if that much has left still more to do, it has also brought the means of working upon a scale of accelerated speed.

The books now existing upon the ancient oracles-above all, upon the Greek oracles-amount to a small library. The facts have been collected from all quarters-examined, sifted, winnowed. Theories have been raised upon these facts under every angle of aspect; and yet, after all, I profess myself dissatisfied. Amongst much that is sagacious, I feel, and I resent with disgust, a taint of falsehood diffused over these recent speculations from vulgar and even counterfeit incredulity; the one gross vice of German philosophy, not less determinate or less misleading than that vice which heretofore, through many centuries, had impoverished this subject, and had sealed its discussion under the anile superstition of the ecclesiastical fathers.

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These fathers, both Greek and Latin, had the ill fortune to be extravagantly esteemed by the Church of Rome; whence, under a natural reaction, they were systematically