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world and events with their proper face on, all seems so commonplace and easy; yet if one turns back but a little bit of the curtain which hides the realities of the mingled lives which make up the world, everything appears different and complicated.'

"Dr. Doldy," said Coventry, turning to him, " Minerva Medica is puzzling her brains too much. I prescribe an immediate holiday for her. Make her give up attempting to think out the problems of this world. Women ought not to think, you know."

"At all events," said Ernestine, with a smile, "it is a mistake to think too much, from a hygienic point of view. One reaches a stage every now and then when one should give up thinking and take to living. And perhaps, too, the experiences of life do more to solve the problems of existence than too much thought."

"Let us all go for a holiday," said Dr. Doldy. "Suppose we hire a barge and go down the river."

"Or a gipsy caravan!" cried Dorothy.

Mr. Lingen rose, to take his departure. The proposed delights were slightly out of his line; a skiff above Windsor, or a four-in-hand to Brighton, might have attracted him.

"When you discuss such idling as that," he said, "it is time for me to go. Such men as I are not made for dreamy holidays. We

are plunged so rapidly from one series of complications into another -our minds are so filled with a succession of romances, crimes, secrets, intrigues-our brains are required to work so incessantly, that such a holiday would be maddening in its quiet." This is what he said, and it sounded very well indeed; it does not do for a busy lawyer to convey the idea that he even knows how to unbend.

"I suppose," said Coventry, "your plan is to rattle half over the world in an express train, thirty-six hours at a stretch. Yours is an essentially modern life. I believe I belong to a bygone age; I like to be idle."

So saying he stretched himself in his hammock. His kittens, who were asleep in it, aroused themselves to purr over him. Mr. Lingen departed; and the others gathered round Coventry to "babble of green fields." And Coventry, with his eyes on Ernestine's sweet face, from which the cloud was passing, murmured snatches of verse full of buttercups and children's laughter.

THE END.

THEISM AND ETHICS IN ANCIENT GREECE.

So much more attention is paid in the schools to the poetry, mythology, and history of Greece than to her gnomists and ethical philosophers, that one falls into the habit of regarding Hellenic glory as the embodiment of consummate art and exquisite Pagan life, and of doubting whether it can be made to present on the spectrum of the mind any of the deep colour of religious thought. Of Plato it is true, with his wealth of ideal suggestions, his quasi-Christianism, something indeed is known, as of Aristotle; but to the most distinctly ethical remains of the Hellenic sages less attention is paid than to the amours of the popularised Jupiter, the brave battles with the Persians, or the political history of Athens.

Perhaps there has been, too, a tinge of unworthy jealousy of sublime thought when found to antedate the Christian era.

It was convenient for sectarian purposes to regard the heathen world as benighted in darkness, and remote from love of God or consciousness of immortality. Marcus Aurelius has been welcomed, but Pythagoras almost ignored; Plutarch has been preferred to Solon.

Or perhaps it is that the door of the ancient philosophy has been too rudely and sharply closed against cram. No way into it has been widened and made easy for the multitude, so that the empty nominalist should enjoy the freedom of the shrine. It is the reverse of a clever bid for popular

favour to say such unpleasant truths as:

Approach ye genuine philosophic few,
The Pythagoric life belongs to you;
But far, far off ye vulgar herd profane,
For Wisdom's voice is heard by you in
vain :

And you, Mind's lowest link, and darksome end,

Good Rulers, Customs, Laws, alone can mend.

Messrs. Moody and Sankey could prophesy smoother things than this to anyone that would throw in his lot with them.

Even in respect of Plato, if we put out of sight the comparatively few men of culture, and take into view the great reading masses, we might almost repeat the words of Jerome, now nearly a millennium and a half old:

"Who is it that now reads Aristotle? How many people know Plato's books, or even his name? Perhaps in a corner some vacuous old man may be conning him over. But of our rustics, our fishermen, the whole orb is speak ing, with them the entire world resounds."

The cause of this prejudice no doubt has been in the past, that we had derived, through another channel, our main stream of such spiritual wisdom as we had made our own. The cause of the comparative neglect of the higher Greek ethics at the present day, when philosophic studies are becoming broadened, perhaps lies in the fact that it is being discovered that the characteristics of the inmost Hellenic thought are rather drawn from

foreign sources than originating in a national inspiration. In speaking of inmost thought we refer to the ethics of life, the faith as to God and man, and omit consideration of the phases of intellectual scepticism, or the progress of physical science.

But there is a reason why we should do well to turn more lovingly to the Greek thinkers, from the Gnomic Poet to the Stoic Sage; and that is, that what they do think they think clearly, so that their expression is like the perfect carving of a statue-firm, full, and artistic in form.

In case of question as to the neglect referred to, it may be sufficient to point to the fact that there is no modern text, and no recent translation whatever, published in this country of the literary remains of the school of Pythagoras; that the works of a voluminous English Platonist of a former generation are scarce in the book market, because when they emerge from old libraries they are demanded for America. That it is only within a year or two that Epictetus has appeared in the series of translations that includes most of the works of the dramatists, the historians, and the orators of Greek-speaking tribes ; that of the remains of Heraclitus, Empedocles, Menander, Epicurus, Cleanthes-to take names almost at random-there is no English version to be found; while Anacreon and Theocritus, as representing the gayest poetry of paganism pure and simple, have, notwithstanding the anomaly in a professedly anti-pagan land, enjoyed a considerable currency.

Linus is the name of the most ancient Greek poet, and is mentioned in the "Iliad." Not prose, but poetry only, was literature in Greece in his day and the poet was the thinker. He is, according to one legend, son of Apollo and of the

muse of choric dancing; to another of Hermes, and the muse of the azure robe; and the invention of the rhythm of verse and melody of music is ascribed to him. Hercules, blind Thamyris, and Orpheus are said to have been among his disciples. He is reputed to have written in Pelasgian characters, which Herodotus calls a barbarous, or extra-Hellenic, language. The probable date of the Pelasgian epoch is about seventeen centuries before our era, a time when Egypt was in the height of her glory, and just changing from an Asiatic to a national dynastic line, when India was at its Vedic period, and Moses was not yet born. The Pelasgian tribe (rovers, wandering storks,' as the name probably implies) is acknowledged to have brought into rude Greece a religious system and theology, to have established the Dodona oracle, and instituted the Cabeiric mysteries, which seem to have had a Phoenician origin.

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The primitive character of the time is shown by the remains of its massy walls, formed of polygonal blocks of stone, roughly wrought rather by friction than by chisel.

Though Linus himself is named in Homer and Herodotus, we only have fragments of his poems on the doubtful authority of collectors of fifteen to twenty-two centuries after his time; so that, although it would be pleasant to note with what optimism philosophy begins in the land that bore so much of beauty, we must doubt whether we have any evidence of the fact, or whether the following are veritable words of Linus:

"In all things we must hope; for

nothing at all is hopeless." All things are easy unto God to perfect, and nothing is vain. Mark how all by struggle is controlled throughout.

Never arrives an end, while always mysteries of the mother goddess of

having ends.

What sort of source had this that is as it is?

Immortal death so wraps all with mortality

All corruptible dies, and what subsists doth alter its guise, With shows in circles of change

and fashions of formThat veiled is the sight of the

whole it will be incorruptible. And ever-during, insomuch as it has reached what it is.

The seventh day is of the good,

the seventh is the birthday : Of the first things is the seventh,

the seventh the consummation."

Tradition carries on his name as that of a song or lay, sung by a boy to the cithara, while the vintagers are at work. As the name has been found in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt, perhaps Linus is only a tradition of music; an embodiment of a soft, simple, plaintive melody. The Greek word ailinos which represents a crooning dirge, is said to be derived from a cry signifying Ah for me Linos.

In our word" linen " perhaps we have the clue to the origin of at least the name "Linus," in the flaxen string of the cithara.

Early Greek history is a singular compound of the poetically mythic with probable facts. Inachus from Phoenicia, who builds Argos, and Cecrops from Egypt, who institutes the Areopagus, stand in the list of early kings with Amphictyon, who is the offspring of a sort of Greek Noah. Cadmus introduces the alphabet from Phoenicia, Danaus brings a colony from Egypt, Minos brings from Crete. laws that lasted a thousand years, and side by side with them is Eumolpus, reputed the son of Poseidon, the sea god. He migrates from Thrace to Attica, and is initiated into the Eleusinian

earthly plenty, Demeter, of which he becomes hierophant. Of the family of Eumolpus, whose descendants presided over the spiritualistic mysteries and claimed from father to son the prophetic gift, was Museus the bard, placed at 1426 B.C. in the Arundel marbles. From him, the servant of the muses, comes our word" museum." His words come down to us that for mortals of brief span of life the sweetest refuge is to sing.

How often from heroic times, when life is heartily enjoyed, comes that undertone of lament for its shortness, and consciousness of necessity of a sturdy cheerfulness. In periods when the flower of national life seems overblown, the days are too full of surfeit for either young or old to cry so eagerly for more of them.

The following are among the fragments of Musæus :

"For ever Art than Strength is better far."

In this single line, so trite in the midst of civilisation, we see the progress of a young community. The following is more significant of an ethical bent:

"Like as the fruitful earth produceth leaves

Some on the ash tree die while others growLeaves of the race of men, they eddy too."

And the following shows the belief in an encompassing cloud of spiritual vicegerents of God as having to do with the direction of men, or perhaps marks the position held by the oracle in the religious idea of the time:

Gladly to hear what the immortal

ones

To men assigned, from cowards marks the brave."

It is significant how in times of simplicity of life, when men are in the perfection of physical health, and, on a materialistic hypothesis, there would seem no reason to expect an under-current of mystery, the problem of life with its spiritual solution is yet ever present. Musaeus, though a priest, is a believer; it is a most arrogant and absurd assumption that the prophetic leaders of men were always laughing in their sleeves, and practising deceits for a wage. A servant of the oracle, he proclaims that to live in blind revel of animal existence is cowardly; to open the eyes and ears, and face what gleams and whispers of destiny may be caught from the undying world in its relation with men, is the clearest sign that marks a noble and brave

man.

The name of Orpheus has so much allied with it, that we may fairly imagine it to have been borne by a line of hierophants, and to have been made to stand for the mystical legends of a cycle. Clement of Alexandria records the opinions of his time about the legend: "Onomacritus the Athenian, who is said to have been the author of the poems inscribed to Orpheus, is ascertained to have lived in the reign of the Pisistratidæ, about the fiftieth Olympiad [the early part of the 6th century B.C.]; and Orpheus, who sailed with Hercules, was the pupil of Musæus. Amphion precedes the Trojan war by two generations. the Crateres of Orpheus are said to be the production of Zopyrus of Heraclea, and The Descent to Hades that of Prodicus of Samos. Ion of Chios relates

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that Pythagoras ascribed certain works of his own to Orpheus. Epigenes, in his book respecting The Poetry ascribed to Orpheus, says that The Descent to Hades and the Sacred Discourse

were the production of Cecrops the Pythagorean; and the Peplus and the Physics of Brontinus." This account is very hearsay to us, since a very large number of the books which Clement cites are lostprobably having perished in the library in which he wrote. But the confused rumours point at least to an Orphic traditional lore which was familiar to Pythagoras.

Plato refers to "what is called the Orphic life" as a discipline including among its tenets the doctrine of abstinence from all things that had life, which would point to a brotherhood of the Indian order, where bodily purification is an essential. The story of Triptolemus, the minister of the goddess Demeter, to whom Plato refers also as representing that period, is a legend showing a familiarity with speculation upon the relation of body and soul. Triptolemus is so favoured by the earth-mother, on a special ground of gratitude, that she feeds him with her own milk and places him on burning coals during the night to destroy the particles of mortality he had received from his parents. The natural mother, giver of that body which is being transformed, so marvels at the unearthly growth of her son, that she spies on Demeter and the process is disturbed.

Of Orpheus the best known story is that of his descent into Hades. Having lost his wife, he gains, through the music of a lyre received from Apollo, an admission to the under-world, soothing even Cerberus, the dog-guardian of Hades, with his strain. The deities of that region consent to restore his lost bride, provided that on departing he forbears looking behind him until he exchanges their borders for those of earth. He promises, but either curiosity as to the process of the re-incarnation, or

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