pursue Odysseus even though Odysseus' only fault was this, that he had rid the earth of a monster. The gods are placable sometimes, but at other times neither a just cause nor manifold offerings can remove their anger. The Zeus of Homer is only an immortal man. The gods are only projections into space and formal embodiments of human feelings, impulses, and passions. Aphrodite is little more than a name for illicit desire; Hermes for the disposition to falsehood. So Athene at times is but a figure for the better judgment of Odysseus or Achilles; Ares stands for the warlike spirit; Apollo for presages of the future.

This brief survey has been sufficient, I trust, to convince the reader that Homer's conception of God is that of a nature-deity, who includes in himself all the forces of the physical and moral world, whether these are good or whether they are evil. Homer's God is God, world,

God is the sum of all hid

man, and devil, all in one. den causes. Different names are given to his various manifestations and appearances-and so we have the nine great Olympians and the whole retinue of minor gods besides. Personality belongs to him-but then in his aspect as Fate impersonality belongs to him also. He is moral and is the source of all law among menbut then he is immoral also, and his law is an arbitrary thing, having no fixed abode in his nature and not always enforced on earth.

It is a most interesting question how such a conception of the godhead could have originated. Are these “fair humanities of old religion," so called, the offspring only of a mythologizing tendency inherent in the childhood of the race? Some writers would have us believe this.

ORIGIN OF THIS CONCEPTION

43

The Greeks, they say, were natural poets. Imagination conceived of nature as alive; each natural phenomenon, each movement of the spirit within, seemed due to a separate will; supernatural beings were thought to find in human affairs everywhere a field for their activity; the artistic instinct unconsciously wrought over this material; the innocent result was the gods of Greece. Alas for the theory, Homer himself furnishes the refutation of it. There is enough of the divine unity, spir ituality, and righteousness left in his representations to show that these growths were not wholly imaginative and poetic. Ever and anon we hear the deep consciousness of God uttering its protests against the impieties with which sense and art seek to drown its voice.

This god-making was not innocent. It began in the desire of fallen humanity to rid itself of the thought of a moral God who would challenge its impurity and punish its transgressions. It transformed the one holy Will into many wills, sometimes conflicting, often malignant, but never unalterably righteous, until at last all things, without the soul and within as well, whether evil or good, were ascribed to them. Art proceeded to clothe these creations with beauty, but it was a meretricious beauty, and it led to further debasement of the idea itself; the statues of the gods became an object of idolatry. This is the genesis of heathenism. The Apostle Paul has given us the only philosophical as well as the only authoritative account of it. It is not the result of natural evolution, but of guilty degradation. It presupposes a primitive knowledge of God. The heathen are "without excuse: because that, knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks,

times. Macaulay could repeat, at fifty, long poems which he had never glanced at since he read them for the first and only time at fifteen. And Scaliger, that modern wonder of learning and scholarship, committed the whole of Homer to memory in twelve days, and all the extant Greek poets in three months. If we only now consider that in prehistoric times this composing and reciting of epic poetry was a regular trade, so richly rewarding with gifts and honors those who were its masters that memory was stimulated to put forth its highest powers, we shall rid ourselves of the last vestige of doubt whether poems as long as Homer's could have been composed without writing and then handed down substantially intact for several centuries.

We ought not to miss here the incidental advantage of our present study in furnishing a parallel to the oral transmission of the Gospel narratives. All competent investigators now agree that from twenty-five to thirtyfive years intervened between the death of our Lord and the putting into its present written form of each of the Synoptics. And there are not wanting those who declare that even in that brief time the stories of Christ's life might become so altered as to be untrustworthy.

But these critics are strangely forgetful of some very common facts. A sacred narrative, which has assumed stereotyped form and which passes from lip to lip, may be submitted to a constant process of verification. Just as many an aged saint who knows her Bible mentally corrects the slips in a young preacher's quotations, so the first disciples, we may believe, were evermore conning and correcting the oral narratives which they heard, purging them of excrescences when such appeared, and

THE EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

31

bringing them back to the standard form. A narrative upon which the church was founded and for which Christians had to answer with their lives might conceivably have been handed down, not simply for twentyfive or thirty-five years, but for a century, without serious loss or change. The Gospel problem seems an easy one when we have once granted that the Homeric poems could have been transmitted intact for more than three

hundred years.

And yet we are not quite through with the objections of Paley. To all that have been mentioned he adds this last of all: Homer, he says, could not have composed poems so long as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," for the reason that there was no reading or hearing public to be addressed by such poems. It is the old evolutionary theory in a new guise. The simple must come before the complex. Early times have patience and attention only for poems that are brief and fragmentary. The complicated epic whole must be the result of the constructive and combining genius of later times.

Unfortunately for this theory the facts are all against it. There was just such a public as the full-fledged "Iliad" or "Odyssey" requires. It was found in the halls of the petty kings or chieftains of early Greece. There every comer was welcome and there were many guests. The numerous retainers of the household constituted of themselves a sufficient audience, and the songs of the bard were the chief amusement of the evening, as athletic games and sports were the amusement of the day.

Minstrelsy was a recognized and honored profession. In the simple days when society has emerged from bar

barism, but has not yet taken on the conventional refinements of an advanced civilization, nothing so stirs the blood and rouses enthusiasm as the story of martial deeds. In "Ivanhoe," Sir Walter Scott has given us a glimpse of such entertainment in the rude halls of our Anglo-Saxon ancestry. So it was among the Greeks. Evening after evening the singer was assured of one constant audience. Instead of being compelled to tell his whole story in a single night, he was the best poet who could longest spin his tale. Provided only that part was connected with part, that there was development of plot, and all tended to a fitting climax, he might sing on for a thousand and one nights, like Queen Scheherezade.

The genuine epic, then, being only a metrical kind of story-telling, naturally has its place at the beginnings of civilization. It is history and mythology and poetry and music all in one. As the incentives to its cultivation are then the greatest, and as original genius is then most free from the fetters of precedent, it is only natural that we should find in these primitive times some of the greatest masters of spontaneous song. Patriarchal monarchy and family life afford the typical field for the development of epic poetry.

Lyric poetry just as naturally belongs to the later day of aristocracies, when a privileged class takes the place of the large family life we have described. Now, the one great house and gathering place is replaced by many and smaller mansions; meetings are of the few; we find the exclusiveness of good society; there are other means of entertainment as well; the song must be elegant, conventional, and brief.

Last of all comes the time of democracy, when power