Imagens das páginas
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URING the First-English

Initial from the MS. of Cadmon.

time nearly nearly our whole Literature had Religion for its theme. I mean by Religion faith in a beneficent Creator, to whom, as supremely wise, just, and merciful, man ascribes the best qualities he can conceive, and to whose likeness he then seeks to conform himself; loving and serving all that he thinks highest in his God, who is the source of every good, and the helper of all faithful effort to draw near to Him. In most men this aspiration is associated with belief that the immaterial part, which yearns to be near God, survives to attain a heaven of the happiness it rightly sought. In every age and country, human nature has been able to conceive the excellence of God only by ascribing to Him all that man thinks best, and to conceive the happiness of an attained heaven only by associating it with human experiences of the highest bliss. Even though more be revealed by God himself, man's character determines how he shall receive the revelation, and we understand a people best when looking

at the form it gives to that conception of the highest life which is the special concern of Religion.

Of the strength of a religious feeling in this country before Christian times, Stonehenge and Avebury bear witness. No man knows when or how those mighty stones, which defy time, were lifted to their places; only the stones themselves tell us that in a day long past, of which we have no other record, the people of this island gave their chief strength to the service of religion. bodies perished, their homes passed away, their form of worship is forgotten, but they left imperishable record of a soul of worship that was in them.

Their

Two Epistles to the Corinthians were ascribed to Clement, who was called the third bishop of Rome after the apostles, and said to have been fellowlabourer with St. Paul at Philippi. In the first of these, Paul is said to have "travelled even to the extreme boundaries of the West." This has been taken to mean that he visited Britain. Jerome, at the end of the fourth century, said that St. Paul imitated the sun in going from one ocean to the other, and that his labours extended to the West. Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus in the fifth century, continuing the tradition, spoke of Paul as having brought salvation to the islands of the Ocean, and in his first discourse on Laws included the Britons among converts of the apostles. There was such a

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