tions, and show a personification of natural powers within a wide poetic pantheism, which has, with the enlightened worshipper at least, a monotheistic centre. Though nymphs, demons, the muses, the furies, the Fates

"Unchanged, aërial, wandering in the night,

Untamed, invisible to mortal sight," and dwelling by the Stygian river, in Pluto's hidden realms, where "White waters of the lake, Falling into the sea with silvery whirls,

Burst from а fountain hid in depths of night,"

are treated each and all as individual powers, and there is a host of powerful deities, to whom worship is due, yet is Zeus-" multiform deity -within and at the back of all, the root and breath of all things. In this pervasive power even the subordinate deities share, as being manifestations of divinity. In the address to Herè we have an example of this rather complicated kind of pantheism : "All things producing, for the breath of life

Without thee nothing knows: since thou, with all

Thyself in wondrous sort communicating,

Art mixed with all."

In the invocation to Apollo, there is naturally a trace of the ancient sun-worship:

"whose lucid eye Light-giving all things views.

this plenteous earth, And ev'n beneath thro' the dark womb of things,

In night's still, gloomy regions, and beyond

Th' impenetrable darkness set with stars."

Pallas, too, has universal attributes: "wisdom to the good,

And to the evil, madness: parent of war,

And counsel: thou art male and female too: Multiform dragoness, famed enthusiastic."

The goddess Demeter is the "giver of all things," "supporter of all mortals"; blessing man with plenteous means of life, as mother Nature is yet. And in a personification of Nature as a deity we may see how a subordi

nate member of the Pantheon can be invested with universal attributes to the extent of a particular sphere of influence, without infringing upon the supreme unity of the Father of Gods.

In the Orphic or pseudo-Orphic system we find, further, a lower range of divine personages having relation to human life, but not credited with the attribute of uni

versal sway. "The Divinity of

Dreams" is addressed as follows:

"Great source of oracles to humankind,

When stealing soft, and whispering to the mind,

Through sleep's sweet silence, and the gloom of night,

Thy power awakes the intellectual sight,

To silent souls the will of Heaven relates,

And silently reveals their future fates."

Phanes or Protogonos, the exemplar of the universe, is a divine emanation, an effulgence of the glory, and an express image of the substance, so to speak, of the Supreme. The Hebrew Angel of the Presence and the gnostic Logos are similar personifications of the powers and agencies of God. The First-Born is thus addressed:

Thomas Taylor finds in Porphyry an explanation of the meaning here, and bases a comment thereon in a style almost purely Buddhistic: "Though the body, by the death which is universally known, may be loosened from the soul, yet, while material passions and affections reside in the soul, the soul will continually verge to another body, and as long as this inclination continues remain connected with body. But when, from the predominance of an intellectual nature, the soul is separated from material affections, it is truly liberated from the body, though the body at the same time verges and clings to the soul, as to the immediate cause of its support."

The Homeric cycle of poems, whether the work of one or of a group of rhapsodists, is really the firstfruits of Greek literature. The Orphic writings claim to be earlier by some three to four centuries, and no doubt there was bardic tradition from the Argonautic times; but in all probability, in passing from the reputed Orphic remains to Homer, we pass up and not down the stream of time.

Homer being in mass of a hearty and vivid naturalism, with what it has of the supernatural, clearly designed for the generality, whose superb bible it became, it

would seem that little attention is its due from the point of view of either theism or sublime ethics. Pagan polytheism, with the rude. morals of a barbarous, if heroic time, this has by many been thought to be all to be expected from Homer. This, indeed, is to be found there, and many a contradiction is to be found within that external polytheism, as well as many a questionable example in the sphere of morals. But there is more in Homer than this. We find, in Indian works meant for the people, instances where a bright narrative is designed as a thick coating of sugar for a small ethical pill. We find in Druidic tradition verses in which the memory is ingeniously cozened into taking up a morsel of moral counsel interlarded in the easiest and brightest of stanzas. The moral traditions of primitive peoples, by whom moral aphorisms are prized more highly than among the over-cultured and sceptical, are wont to be transmitted in the form of pithy sententious maxims, which easily pass current amongst unstudious and simple folk and grow into a treasury of proverbial lore.

The Homeric singers wrought in this fashion; and scattered over the writings that have come down to us are to be found by searching a number of little fragments, which, if gathered, would be recognised as an appreciable contribution to ethics.

Mr. Gladstone goes further than this when he says: "The morality of the Homeric man is founded on duty, not to the particular personages of the Olympian system, but to the divinity, theos, or the gods in general, theoi. Sometimes to Zeus; not however as the mere head of the Olympian Court, but as heir-general to the fragments and relics of the old monotheistic traditions."

one

It is becoming generally recognised that in all religions two forces have been at work: that of the more spiritual minds in cleansing the vision of the mental eye that has turned toward God, and in the concentration and deepening of the impression of Heaven's relation to us. The other force has been that of the unawakened minds disintegrating and distorting all grand conceptions, splitting up large ideals into small, and requiring even minor abstractions to be showily clothed as the necessary preliminary before attracting any heed. It is this complex force of popular demand and attempt to satisfy it that has led to the absurd and self-contradictory mythologies of polytheism. Egypt the gods, to all but the eyes that could penetrate beneath the mask, were lost in the multiplicity of stony images that once living symbols. In Greece the art faculty absorbed a nation's spiritual dreamings into beautiful visible forms, and tended to cloud the deep consciousness of the invisible by bringing everything into the palpable and the external.

In

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Mr. Gladstone says again: "If Homer can be exhibited as the father of Greek letters in most of their branches, there is one great exception, which belongs to a later development. That exception was the philosophy of Greece; which seems to have owed its first inception to the Asiatic contact estab

lished after the great eastern migration. The absence of all abstract or metaphysical ideas. from Homer is truly remarkable. Of all poets he is the most objective, and the least speculative." It is perfectly true that Homer is most poetically free from mystical obscurities, and that the formal philosophy of Greece began after his time; but we ought scarcely to deny to the Homeric cycle of ballads the possession of a fair quantity of the current coin of a simple philosophy. Indeed, in the following, the great Homeric scholar supplements and so corrects his doctrine respecting Homer: "In this splendid work of art we trace the real elements of worship and of an ethical system, drawing its strength from obligations to an unseen Power; to a plurality, which is also to a great extent an unity, and which rules the world. Lastly, while some portions of the scheme point us towards an earlier and also a ruder state, and others in the direction of a later and corrupt civilisation, a third portion reveals a primitive basis of monotheism, and ideas in connection with it, which seem to defy explanation, except when we compare them with the most ancient of the Hebrew traditions."

The consideration which we purpose giving to the ethical element in Homer, and to the philosophy of those that came after him, must be postponed to a succeeding paper.