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Parsism accentuated in its doctrine of sin. Zoroaster calls upon all men to be saved, and opens up to many men the way of salvation. But even those who have reached that way must be impressed that there is something wanting. It is not enough that a man should be redeemed, not enough that he should be loosed from his shackles and told that he is free. What about that life which he has lived within the shackles? What about the deeds done in that dark past from which he has been liberated? It is all very well that he himself has been emancipated from the sinking ship; but the ship is sinking still, and it is sinking through his blame. Can anything be done to undo the past deeds of the man? Parsism answers, and on its principles can only answer, "No." There is no atonement in this religion, no redress of former wrongs, no times for the restitution of all things. The sweetest note of Christianity is its promise of a cancelled past, its message to the weary soul that the evil deeds it has done shall be made to work out a beneficent end. The joy of a Paul was not only that all things had been made new, but that old things had passed away. He felt that if he had planted tares in the past, it was not enough for him to know that he had now ceased to plant them. He must be told, if he would be happy, that the tares he had sown would themselves be made conducive to the production of a riper wheat.

That is what Parsism could not tell him, could not tell any man. It could promise to Moses a salvation from his ark of bulrushes; it could predict for Joseph a liberation from his Egyptian dungeon; but it could not tell Moses that he had been magnified through his peril, nor Joseph that the dungeon itself had made him free. To the furthest horizon of its vision Parsism remains dualistic still. Even on that view of its most sanguine disciples, which looks forward to a salvation of universal man, the dualism continues unbroken and unmodified; for the past is itself unredeemed, and the errors of yesterday are written in everlasting colours. The glory of Parsism has been to exhibit the natural gulf between the pure and the unholy; it has been reserved for a loftier faith to construct a bridge between them.

CHAPTER IX.

THE MESSAGE OF GREECE.

HE who would photograph the spirit of religions must distinguish carefully between what is spontaneous and what is reflective. The former is a worship; the latter is a philosophy. The religion of a nation is its impulse towards an ideal; it is therefore in all its forms essentially a sacred movement. But the philosophic culture of a nation is a secular and a secularising process; even where it relates to a religious subject, it breathes the air of the common day. Nor can it be strictly said that the philosophy of any nation is a product purely national; it is always, to a great extent, the result of conscious appropriation from the best minds of many lands. Men like Thales and Parmenides, like Aristotle and Plato, like Epicurus and Zeno, cannot be said to be simply the offspring of their age and clime. We are very significantly told that before they wrote they travelled. Their writing was therefore a conscious and deliberate effort to emancipate

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themselves from what was purely local and national, and to reach a basis of thought the ground. of whose recommendation to the world should be the fact that it was itself grounded on a universal soil.

Accordingly I shall, in the course of the present studies, deal with the philosophic sects of Greece as I have dealt with the philosophic sects of India ; I shall pass them by. I shall confine this study of Greek religion to an examination of its earliest anessage that message which preceded all intellectual culture, and was revealed to the spontaneous instincts of the heart. The period of its natureworship is really the distinctive period of Greek religion; all its other times and modes are the result, more or less, of foreign influence. What, then, is this earliest message of the Hellenic faith? Is there anything peculiar about it, anything which marks it out from other forms and gives it the right to a distinct place among the religions of the world? It is popularly called a system of Polytheism; but there is nothing new in that. It is essentially a reverence for the things of nature; but neither in this is there anything new. If it is to be assigned a distinctive place in theology, it must be on other grounds than these-on grounds which make its Polytheism unique and its nature-worship singular. Does there exist in this faith such an element of peculiarity?

I think there does. I believe it will be found that there is one respect in which the religious worship of the Greek differs essentially from the religious worship of all other nations, whether Aryan or Semitic. If I were asked to express epigrammatically the difference between this religion and the forms of faith already considered, I might put it thus: The message of China is to teach the glories of yesterday. The message of India is to trace the development of the day. The message of Persia is to exhibit the struggle between the day and the night. The message of Greece is to reveal the intensity of the hour. When we have reached this last point, we have touched hitherto untrodden ground. China led us back to the past; India drove us forward to the future; Greece keeps us chained within the present. Here for the first time man looks upon the passing scene, and contemplates it not as passing but as permanent. Here for the first time man casts his eye upon the world as it actually exists, and sets himself to justifynay, to reverence-things as they are. Other faiths had sought their object in the glorification of things; the faith of Greece seeks its object in that which is manifested to the common eye. India descended from the heavens to the earth; from the earth to the heavens. On earth she is always more at home. Her earliest and her latest philosophy starts from the reverence of things pro

Greece ascends

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