Crete, had the title of the local god given to him in his lifetime, and after death inscribed upon his tomb, we shall have a theory which explains all the facts of the alleged sepulture of Jove in that island, without resorting to a supposition at once revolting to natural piety, contradicted by the speaking symbolism of the general body of Hellenic mythology, and contrary to all that is historically known of the development of theological ideas in the Aryan race.

So much for this strange chapter of the deification of dead men in ancient Greece. But flinging the speculation of Euhemerus aside, as destitute alike of nobility and of probability, there can be no doubt that the religious homage actually paid by the Greeks to such representative men as Hercules and Theseus (for which they used a special word évayiğew as opposed to Ove) exercised a most elevating influence on the national character. It was not among the herces or demigods, but among a certain class of the supreme Olympians themselves, that the germs of a most degrading moral corruption were to be found. The priesthood of a worship that could be represented by such a debased sensualist as Heliogabalus might well be exchanged for any sort of virtuous atheism; but the national honours paid by cultivated Greece to such names as Theseus and

Hercules were one step in the ladder of healthy reverence that consistently leads up to GOD.

One other remark, and we close. We have talked only of the moral influences of polytheism, as these are in fact the most important. A superstition which, though founded on erroneous intellectual conceptions, works practically in the main so as to cherish the best emotions and call into action the noblest energies of human beings, is always better than the cold negations, blank vacuities, or rabid hostilities of atheism. But there is one danger to which a religion the growth of mere emotion and imagination is exposed from which its ultimate ruin after however long a period of prosperity may surely be predicted. Man is a thinking animal as well as a feeling animal: his brain, if not able to supply the steam-power which moves the social machine, has nevertheless rights of inquiry and survey which it may not forego; and the breaches in the coherent structure of the theology of Homer and Hesiod were so many and so exposed, that a people far less subtle and far less proud of their wisdom than the Greeks, in the natural progress of the popular intellect, could not fail to use them as irresistible invitations to assaults from the side of Reason, which no weapons drawn from a purely

emotional and æsthetical armoury could repel. It was only a question of delay, therefore, not of doubtful issue, how soon the decided monotheistic or pantheistic polemics vigorously started by individual independent thinkers, such as Xenophanes of Colophon, so early as 600 B.C., would ripen into a general revolt, and large defection of the popular mind from the most cherished religious traditions of their race. No religion can stand when it comes into a position of glaring contrariety to the intellectual consciousness of the age.

CHAPTER V.

BUDDHISM.

Μηδεὶς ὑμᾶς καταβραβευέτο θέλων ἐν ταπεινοφροσύνη καὶ θρησκείᾳ τῶν ἁγγέλων, ἃ μὴ ἑώρακεν ἐμβατεύων, εἰκῇ φυσιούμενος ὑπὸ τοῦ νοὸς τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ· ἅτινά ἐστιν λόγον μὲν ἔχοντα σοφίας ἐν ἐθελοθρησκείᾳ καὶ ταπεινοφροσύνῃ καὶ ἀφειδίᾳ σώματος, οὐκ ἐν τιμῇ τινὶ πρὸς πλησμονὴν τῆς σαρκός.

ST. PAUL.

HEN I began to consider seriously the strange

WH

epiphany of British atheism or agnosticism, as it paraded itself publicly in the persons of Bradlaugh, John Stuart Mill, Miss Martineau, Tyndall, and others, my attention was naturally called to the alleged fact-which our native agnostics seemed to have a special delight in recognising-that in the far East atheism had been publicly professed for more than two thousand years, and was at present the cornerstone of the faith of more than four hundred millions of the human race. A religion based upon atheism was certainly an astounding fact-a fact, indeed, unintelligible, and according to the common use of

language, self-contradictory. To my understanding, at least, it seemed as meaningless to talk of religion without God, as to talk of the propositions in Euclid without the postulates on which they depend. But this was not all. Contrary to all human instincts, except perhaps the instincts of that Siamese pair, Mr. Atkinson and Miss Martineau, the Buddhists, we were informed, delighted in the idea of annihilation ; and to be entirely blotted out from the world of conscious existences was, to their devout imaginations, the ideal of human bliss. Absurd and abnormal as these notions might seem to be, it was in vain to brush them aside, as one might flap away an army of impertinent flies, or stop the ear to the maundering babble of some adjacent bedlam. Here stood the fact: next door to us at Calcutta in the East, four hundred millions of reasonable beings professing a belief in a doctrine essentially unreasonable, and contradicting, as often as they draw their breath, the primary instincts of all living creatures in this Western hemisphere of the globe. It was a matter manifestly that demanded inquiry; and there was at the same time the best reason to believe that the broad statement of these monstrous doctrines, as it was circulated among the sober Europeans would require to be modified considerably, perhaps