may have been a failure as regarded the immediate object, rarely, indeed, it has happened, but that much indirect illumination has resulted-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 Otfried Muellers. And, if that much has left still more to do, it has also brought the means of working upon a scale of far 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, we profess ourselves to be dissatisfied. Amongst much that is sagacious, we feel and we 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 stopped its discussion under the anile superstition of the ecclesiastical Fathers. 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 depreciated by the great leaders of the Protestant Reformation. And yet hardly in a corresponding degree. For there was, after all, even among the Reformers, a deep-seated prejudice in behalf of all that was "primitive" in Christianity; under which term, by some confusion of ideas, the Fathers often benefited. Primitive Christianity was reasonably venerated; and on this argument, that, for the first three centuries, it was necessarily more sincere. We do not think so much of that sincerity which af fronted the fear of persecution; because, after all, the searching persecutions were rare and intermitting, and not perhaps, in any case, so fiery as they have been represented. We think more of that gentle but insidious persecution which lay in the solicitations of besieging friends, and more still of the continual temptations which haunted the irresolute Christian in the fascinations of the public amusements. The theatre, the circus, and far beyond both, the cruel amphitheatre, constituted, for the ancient world, a passionate enjoyment, that by many authors, and especially through one period of time, is described as going to the verge of frenzy. And we, in modern times, are far too little aware in what degree these great carnivals, together with another attraction of great cities, the pomps and festivals of the Pagan worship, broke the monotony of domestic life, which, for the old world, was even more oppressive than it is for us. In all principal cities, so as to be within the reach of almost all provincial inhabitants, there was a hippodrome, often uniting the functions of the circus and the amphitheatre; and there was a theatre. From all such pleasures the Christian was sternly excluded by his very profession of faith. From the festivals of the Pagan religion his exclusion was even more absolute; against them he was a sworn militant protester from the hour of his baptism. And when these modes of pleasurable relaxation had been subtracted from ancient life, what could remain? Even less, perhaps, than most readers have been led to consider. For the ancients had no such power of extensive locomotion, of refreshment for their wearied minds, by travelling and change of scene, as we children of modern civilization possess. No ships had then been fitted up for passengers, nor public carriages established, nor roads opened extensively, nor hotels so much as imagined hypothetically; because the relation of eva, or the obligation to reciprocal hospitality, and latterly, the Roman relation of patron and client, had stifled the first motions of enterprise of the ancients; in fact, no man travelled but the soldier and the man of political authority. Consequently, in sacrificing public amusements, the Christian sacrificed all pleasure whatsoever that was not rigorously domestic; whilst in facing the contingencies of persecutions that might arise under the rapid succession of changing emperors, they faced a perpetual anxiety more trying to the fortitude than any fixed and measurable evil. Here, certainly, we have a guarantee for the deep faithfulness of early Christians, such as never can exist for more mixed bodies of professors subject to no searching trials. Better the primitive Christians were, (by no means individually better, but better on the total body,) yet they were not in any intellectual sense wiser. Unquestionably the elder Christians participated in the local follies, prejudices, superstitions, of their several provinces and cities, except where any of these happened to be too conspicuously at war with the spirit of love or the spirit of purity which exhaled at every point from the Christian faith; and, in all intellec. tual features, as were the Christians generally, such were the Fathers. Amongst the Greek Fathers, one might be unusually learned, as Clement of Alexandria, and another might be reputed unusually eloquent, as Gregory Nazianzen, or Basil. Amongst the Latin Fathers, one might be a man of admirable genius, as far beyond the poor vaunted Rousseau in the impassioned grandeur of his thoughts, as he was in truth and purity of heart; we speak of St Augustine, (usually called St Austin,) and many might be distinguished by various literary merits. But could these advantages anticipate a higher civilization? Most unquestionably some of the Fathers were the élite of their own age, but not in advance of their age. They, like all their contemporaries, were besieged by errors, ancient, inveterate, traditional; and accidentally, from one cause special to themselves, they were not merely liable to error, but usually prone to error. This cause lay in the polemic form which so often they found a necessity, or a convenience, or a temptation for assuming, as teachers or defenders of the truth. He who reveals a body of awful truth to a candid and willing auditory, is content with the grand simplicities of truth in the quality of his proofs. And truth, where it happens to be of a high order, is generally its own witness to all who approach it in the spirit of childlike docility. But far different is the position of that teacher who addresses an audience composed in various proportions of sceptical enquirers, obstinate oppo nents, and malignant scoffers. Less than an apostle is unequal to the suppression of all human reactions incident to wounded sensibilities. Scorn is too naturally met by retorted scorn: malignity in the Pagan, which characterized all the known cases of signal opposition to Christianity, could not but hurry many good men into a vindictive pursuit of victory. Generally, where truth is communicated polemically, (this is, not as it exists in its own inner simplicity, but as it exists in external relation to error,) the temptation is excessive to use those arguments which will tell at the moment upon the crowd of bystanders, by preference to those which will approve themselves ultimately to enlightened disciples. Hence it is, that, like the professional rhetoricians of Athens, not seldom the Christian Fathers, when urgently pressed by an antagonist equally mendacious and ignorant, could not resist the human instinct for employing arguments such as would baffle and confound the unprincipled opponent, rather than such as would satisfy the mature Christian. If a man denied himself all specious arguments, and all artifices of dialectic subtlety, he must renounce the hopes of a present triumph; for the light of absolute truth on moral or on spiritual themes, is too dazzling to be sustained by the diseased optics of those habituated to darkness. And hence we explain not only the many gross delusions of the fathers, their sophisms, their errors of fact and chronology, their attempts to build great truths upon fantastic etymologies, or upon popular conceits in science that have long since been exploded, but also their occasional unchristian tempers. To contend with an unprincipled and malicious liar, such as Julian the Apostate, in its original sense the first deliberate miscreant, offered a dreadful snare to any man's charity. And he must be a furious bigot who will justify the rancorous lampoons of Gregory Nazianzen. Are we, then, angry on behalf of Julian? So far as he was interested, not for a moment would we have suspended the descending scourge. Cut him to the bone, we should have exclaimed at the time! Lay the knout into every "raw" that can be found! For we are of opinion that Julian's duplicity is not yet adequately understood. But what was right as regarded the claims of the criminal, was not right as regarded the duties of his opponent. Even in this mischievous renegade, trampling with his ourang-outang hoofs the holiest of truths, a Christian bishop ought still to have respected his sovereign, through the brief period that he was such, and to have commiserated his benighted brother, however wilfully astray, and however hatefully seeking to quench that light for other men, which, for his own misgiving heart, we could undertake to show that he never did succeed in quenching. We do not wish to enlarge upon a theme both copious and easy. But here, and every where, speaking of the Fathers as a body, we charge them with antichristian practices of a twofold order; sometimes as supporting their great cause in a spirit alien to its own, retorting in a temper not less uncharitable than that of their opponents; sometimes, again, as adopting arguments that are unchristian in their ultimate grounds; resting upon errors the reputation of errors; upon superstitions the overthrow of superstitions; and drawing upon the armouries of darkness for weapons that, to be durable, ought to have been of celestial temper. Alternately, in short, the Fathers trespass against those affections which furnish to Christianity its moving powers, and against those truths which furnish to Christianity its guiding lights. Indeed, Milton's memorable attempt to characterize the Fathers as a body, contemptuous as it is, can hardly be challenged as overcharged. Never in any instance were these aberrations of the Fathers more vividly exemplified than in their theories upon the Pagan Oracles. On behalf of God, they were determined to be wiser than God; and, in demonstration of scriptural power, to advance doctrines which the Scriptures had nowhere warranted. At this point, however, we shall take a short course; and, to use a vulgar phrase, shall endeavour to "kill two birds with one stone." It happens that the earliest book in our modern European literature, which has subsequently obtained a station of authority on the subject of the ancient Oracles, applied itself entirely to the erroneous theory of the Fathers. This is the celebrated Antonii Van Dale, "De Ethnicorum Oraculis Dissertationes," which was pub lished at Amsterdam at least as early as the year 1682; that is, 160 years ago. And upon the same subject there has been no subsequent book which maintains an equal rank. Van Dale might have treated his theme simply with a view to the investigation of the truth, as some recent enquirers have preferred doing; and, in that case, the Fathers would have been noticed only as incidental occasions might bring forward their opinionstrue or false. But to this author the errors of their Fathers seemed capital; worthy, in fact, of forming his principal object; and, knowing their great authority in the Papal Church, he anticipated, in the plan of attaching his own views to the false views of the Fathers, an opening to a double patronage-that of the Protestants in the first place, as interested in all doctrines seeming to be anti-papal; that of the Sceptics in the second place, as interested in the exposure of whatever had once commanded, but subsequently lost, the superstitious reverence of mankind. On this policy, he determined to treat the subject polemically. He fastened, therefore, upon the Fathers with a deadly acharnement, that evidently meant to leave no arrears of work for any succeeding assailant ; and it must be acknowledged, that, simply in relation to this purpose of hostility, his work is triumphant. So much was not difficult to accomplish; for barely to enunciate the leading doctrine of the Fathers is, in the ear of any chronologist, to overthrow it. But, though successful enough in its functions of destruction, on the other hand, as an affirmative or constructive work, the long treatise of Van Dale is most unsatisfactory. It leaves us with a hollow sound ringing in the ear, of malicious laughter from gnomes and imps grinning over the weaknesses of manhis paralytic facility in believing-his fraudulent villany in abusing this facility-but in no point accounting for those real effects of diffusive social benefits from the Oracle machinery, which must arrest the attention of candid students, amidst some opposite monuments of incorrigible credulity or of elaborate imposture. As a book, however, belonging to that small cycle (not numbering, perhaps, on all subjects, above threescore) which may be said to have moulded and controlled the public opinion of Europe through the last five generations, already for itself the work of Van Dale merits a special attention. It is confessedly the classical book— the original fundus for the arguments and facts applicable to this question; and an accident has greatly strengthened its authority. Fontenelle, the most fashionable of European authors, at the opening of the eighteenth century, writing in a language at that time even more predominant than at present, did in effect employ all his advantages to propagate and popularize the views of Van Dale. Scepticism naturally courts the patronage of France; and in effect that same remark which a learned Belgian (Van Brouwer) has found frequent occasion to make upon single sections of Fontenelle's work, may be fairly extended into a representative account of the whole-" L'on trouve les mêmes arguments chez Fontenelle, mais dégagés des longueurs du savant Van Dale, el exprimés avec plus d'élégance." This rifaccimento did not injure the original work in reputation: it caused Van Dale to be less read, but to be more esteemed; since a man, confessedly distinguished for his powers of composition, had not thought it beneath his ambition to adopt and recompose Van Dale's theory. This important position of Van Dale with regard to the effectual creed of Europe so that, whether he were read directly or were slighted for a more fashionable expounder, equally in either case it was his doctrines which prevailed must always confer a circumstantial value upon the original dissertations, "De Ethnicorum Oraculis." This original work of Van Dale is a book of considerable extent. But in spite of its length, it divides substantially into two great chapters, and no more, which coincide in fact with the two separate dissertations. The first of these dissertations, occupying 181 pages, enquires into the failure and extinction of the Oracles; when they failed, and under what circumstances. The second of these dissertations enquires into the machinery and resources of the Oracles during the time of their prosperity. In the first dissertation, the object is to expose the folly and gross ignorance of the Fathers, who insisted on representing the history of the case roundly in this shape-as though all had prospered with the Oracles up to the na tivity of Christ; but that after his crucifixion, and simultaneously with the first promulgation of Christianity, all Oracles had suddenly drooped; or, to tie up their language to the rigour of their theory, had suddenly expired. All this Van Dale peremptorily denies; and, in these days, it is scarcely requisite to add, triumphantly denies; the whole hypothesis of the Fathers having literally not a leg to stand upon; and being in fact the most audacious defiance to historical records that perhaps the annals of human folly present. In the second dissertation, Van Dale combats the other notion of the Fathers-that, during their prosperous ages, the Oracles had moved by an agency of evil spirits. He on the contrary contends that, from the first hour to the last of their long domination over the minds and practice of the Pagan world, they had moved by no agencies whatever but those of human fraud, intrigue, collision, applied to human blindness, credulity, and superstition. We shall say a word or two upon each question. As to the first, viz. when it was that the Oracles fell into decay and silence? thanks to the headlong rashness of the Fathers, Van Dale's assault cannot be refused or evaded. In reality, the evidence against them is too flagrant and hyperbolical. If we were to quote from Juvenal-" Delphis et Oracula cessant," in that case, the Fathers chal. lenge it as an argument on their side, for that Juvenal described a state of things immediately posterior to Christianity; yet even here the word cessant points to a distinction of cases which already in itself is fatal to their doctrine. By cessant Juvenal means evidently what we in these days should mean in saying of a ship in actionthat her fire was slackening. This powerful poet, therefore, wiser so far than the Christian Fathers, distinguishes two separate cases; first, the state of torpor and languishing which might be (and in fact was) the predicament of many famous Oracles through centuries not fewer than five, six, or even eight; secondly, the state of absolute dismantling and utter extinction which, even before his time, had confounded individual Oracles of the inferior class, not from changes affecting religion, whether true or false, but from political revolutions. Here, therefore, lies the first blunder of the Fathers, that they confound with to tal death the long drooping which befell many great Oracles from languor in the popular sympathies, under changes hereafter to be noticed; and, consequently, from revenues and machinery continually decaying. That the Delphie Oracle itself of all oracles the most illustrious-had not expired, but simply slumbered for centuries, the Fathers might have been convinced themselves by innumerable passages in authors contemporary with themselves; and that it was continually throwing out fitful gleams of its ancient power, when any very great man (suppose a Cæsar) thought fit to stimulate its latent vitality, is notorious from such cases as that of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found it but too clear-sighted; and it was no contempt in him, but too ghastly a fear and jealousy, which laboured to seal up the grander ministrations of the Oracle for the future. What the Pythia had foreshown to himself, she might foreshow to others; and, when tempted by the same princely bribes, she might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views in other great officers. Thus, in the new condition of the Roman power, there was a perpetual peril, lest an oracle so potent as that of Delphi should absolutely create rebellions, by first suggesting hopes to men in high commands. Even as it was, all treasonable assumptions of the purple for many generations, commenced in the hopes inspired by auguries, prophecies, or sortileges. And had the great Delphic Oracle, consecrated to men's feelings by hoary superstition, and privileged by secrecy, come forward to countersign such hopes, many more would have been the wrecks of ambition, and even bloodier would have been the blood-polluted line of the imperial successions. Prudence, therefore, it was, and state-policy, not the power of Christianity, which gave the final shock (of the original shock we shall speak elsewhere) to the grander functions of the Delphic Oracle. But in the mean time, the humbler and more domestic offices of this oracle, though naturally making no noise at a distance, seem long to have survived its state relations. And, apart were from the sort of galvanism notoriously applied by Hadrian, sure y the Fathers could not have seen Plutarch's account of its condition, already a century later than our Saviour's nativity. The Pythian priestess, as we gather from him, had by that time become a less select and dignified personage; she was no longer a princess in the land-a change which was proximately due to the impoverished income of the temple; but she was still in existence; still beld in respect; still trained, though at inferior cost, to her difficult and showy ministrations. And the whole establishment of the Delphie god, if necessarily contracted from that scale which had been suitable when great kings and commonwealths constant suitors within the gates of Delphi, still clung (like the Venice of modern centuries) to her old ancestral honours, and kept up that decent household of ministers which corresponded to the altered ministrations of her temple. In fact, the evidences on behalf of Delphi as a princely house, that had indeed partaken in the decaying fortunes of Greece, but naturally was all the prouder from the irritating contrast of her great remembrances, are so plentifully dispersed through books, that the Fathers must have been willingly duped. That in some way they were duped is too notorious from the facts, and might be suspected even from their own occasional language: take, as one instance, amongst a whole harmony of similar expressions, this short passage from Eusebius-of 'Eaλnves óμoñoΤεντες εκλελοιπέναι αυτών τα χρηστηρία: the Greeks admitting that their Oracles have failed. (There is, however, a disingenuous vagueness in the very word εκλελοιπέναι,) εδ' άλλοτε ποτε εξ atavos-and when? why, at no other crisis through the total range of their existence-η κατα τες χρονες της ευαί Γελικης διδασκαλίας-than precisely at the epoch of the evangelical dispensation, &c. Eusebius was a man of too extensive reading to be entirely satisfied with the Christian representations upon this point. And in such indeterminate phrases as xαTE TES xgovs, (which might mean indifferently the entire three centuries then accomplished from the first promulgation of Christianity, or specifically that narrow punctual limit of the earliest promulgation,) it is easy to |