future, and the dread of those upper powers who no longer awakened in him any feelings of sympathy. It drove Zeno the Stoic, to consider whether a man may not find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what is beyond him be ever so friendly."

Woe to the nation or the society in which this individualizing and separating process is going on in the human mind! Whether it take the form of a religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the sign and the cause of senility, decay, and death. If man begins to forget that he is a social being, a member of a body, and that the only truths which are worthy objects of his philosophical search, are those which are equally true for every man, which will equally avail every man, which he must proclaim as far as he can to every man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast; he enters, I believe, into a lie, and helps forward the dissolution of that society of which he is a member. I care little whether what he holds be true or not. If it be true, he has made it a lie by appropriating it proudly and selfishly to himself, and by excluding others from it. He has darkened his own power of vision by that act of self-appropriation, so that even if he sees a truth, he can only see it refractedly, discoloured, by the medium of his own private likes and dislikes, and fulfil that great and truly philosophic law, that he who loveth not his brother is in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth. And so it befell these old Greek schools.

One eastern nation had intermingled closely with the Macedonian race, and from it Alexandrian thought re

ceived a new impulse. Egypt altogether is said to have contained 200,000 Jews. They had schools there which were so esteemed by their whole nation throughout the East, that the Alexandrian Rabbis, the Light of Israel, as they were called, may be fairly considered as the centre of Jewish thought and learning for several centuries.

Their philosophy took its stand, as you all know, on certain ancient books of their people; histories, laws, poems, philosophical treatises, which all have one element peculiar to themselves, namely, the assertion of a living personal Ruler and Teacher, not merely of the Jewish race, but of all the nations of the earth. After the return of their race from Babylon, their own records give abundant evidence that this strange people became the most exclusive and sectarian which the world ever saw.

In proportion as they began to deny that their unseen personal Ruler had anything to do with the Gentiles,— in proportion as they considered themselves as His only subjects, or rather Him and His guidance as their own private property, they began to lose all living or practical belief that He did guide them. He became a being of the past; one who had taught and governed their forefathers in old times; not one who was teaching and governing them now.

No doubt they were right in their sense of the awful change which had passed over their nation. There was an infinite difference between them and the old Hebrew writers. They had lost something which those old prophets possessed. I invite you to ponder, each for himself,

on the causes of this strange loss; bearing in mind, that they lost their forefathers' heirloom, exactly in proportion as they began to believe it their exclusive possession, and to deny other human beings any right to or share in it. It may have been, that the light given to their forefathers had, as they thought, really departed. It may have been also, that the light was there all around them still, as bright as ever; but that they would not open their eyes and behold it; or rather could not open them, because selfishness and pride had sealed them. But, of the fact of the change, there was no doubt. For the old Hebrew Seers were men dealing with the loftiest and deepest laws; the Rabbis were shallow pedants.

But you will say, "This does not look like a school likely to regenerate Alexandrian thought." True; and yet it did regenerate it, for good and for evil; for these men had among them, and preserved, faithfully enough for all practical purposes, the old literature of their race; a literature which I firmly believe, if I am to trust the experience of 1,900 years, is destined to explain all other literatures; because it has firm hold of the one eternal rootidea which gives life, meaning, divine sanction, to every germ or fragment of human truth which is in any of them.

Socrates and Plato acknowledged a divine teacher of the human spirit; that was the ground of their philosophy. So did the literature of the Jews. Socrates and Plato, with all the Greek sages, till the sophistic era, held that the object of philosophy was the search after that which

truly exists; that he who found that, found wisdom; Philo's books taught him the same truth; but they taught him also, that the search for wisdom was not merely the search for that which is, but for Him who is; not for a thing, but for a person. do not mean that Plato and the elder Greeks had not that object in view also; but I do think that they saw it infinitely less clearly than the old Jewish sages. These sages were utterly unable to conceive of an absolute truth, except as residing in an absolutely true person; of absolute wisdom, except in an absolutely wise person; of an absolute order and law, except in a lawgiver; of an absolute good, except in an absolutely good person, any more than either they or we can conceive of an absolute love, except in an absolutely loving person. I say boldly, that I think them right, on all grounds of Baconian induction. For all these qualities. are only known to us as exhibited in persons; and if we believe them to have any absolute and eternal existence at all, to be objective and independent of us, and the momentary moods and sentiments of our own mind, they must exist in some absolute and eternal person, or they are mere notions, abstractions, words, which have no counterparts.

What is the secret of the eternal freshness, the eternal beauty, ay, I may say boldly, in spite of all their absurdities and immoralities, the eternal righteousness of those old Greek myths. What made them alone of all old mythologies the parents of truly beautiful sculpture, painting, poetry? What is it which makes us love them still; find,

even at times against our consciences, new meaning, new beauty, in them; and brings home the story of Perseus or of Hercules, alike to the practised reason of Niebuhr, and the untutored instincts of Niebuhr's child? Why is it that, in spite of our disagreeing with them and their morality, we still persist- and long may we persist, or rather be compelled, as it were, by blind instinct, to train our boys upon those old Greek dreams; and confess, whenever we try to find a substitute for them in our educational schemes, that we have as yet none? Because those old Greek stories do represent the Deities as the archetypes, the kinsmen, the teachers, the friends, the inspirers of men. Because while the school-boy reads how the gods were like to men, only better, wiser, greater; how the heroes are the children of the gods, and the slayers of the monsters which devour the earth; how Athene taught men weaving, and Phoebus music, and Vulcan the cunning of the stithy; how the gods took pity on the noblehearted son of Danaë, and lent him celestial arms, and guided him over desert and ocean to fulfil his vow; that boy is learning deep lessons of metaphysic, more in accordance with the reine vernunft, the pure reason whereby man preserves that which is moral, and spiritual, and eternal, than he would from all disquisitions about being and becoming, which ever tormented the weary brain of

man. •

The belief in the Logos or Dæmon speaking to the Reason of men, was one which neither Plutarch nor Marcus Aurelius, as far as we can see, learnt from the