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of his own nothingness. Yet, when we look deeper, it may perhaps be found that these two views are not so discordant as they seem; that there is at least a point in which for a moment they find a meeting-place. The Greek magnifies strength, and the Christian magnifies humility; but does not the Christian magnify humility as an ultimate source of strength? Is it not because he sees in selfforgetfulness the road to self-enlargement, because he recognises in the spirit of sacrifice the promise and potence of life, that he insists before all things on the soul becoming unconscious of itself? Is not weakness here also contemplated as a means of struggle, and crowned as a road to victory? Thus strangely do these two forms of faith, so different in their origin and so divergent in their general aspects, exhibit at one corner an attitude of concord and alliance-an attitude which may have found its ultimate realisation in that singular union of the son of Abraham with the son of Hellas which marked the close of the Jewish Theocracy, and constituted the dawn of the Christian day.

And if the Greek mythology presents a point of union with Christian thought, it presents equally a point of union with that which at first sight seems more pronouncedly its opposite than the religion of Jesus; I mean the speculations of modern science. If there are two things which at the outset appear irreconcilable, they are the dreams of the ancient Greek

and the conclusions of the modern evolutionist. The one stands at the beginning, and the other at the close of human development. And yet in the optimism of ancient Greece, there is something which finds an analogy with the speculations of modern evolution. As the morning is more like the evening than any other part of the day, so the carliest phase of humanity resembles its latest manifestation more than its intermediate phases. Modern science is on the whole optimistic. It believes that the development of man is an upward development, and that when the creature is fully adjusted to his environment he will find peace. But this ultimate optimism of modern science implies much more; it implies that every step of the process has been a step in the right direction in the direction of the goal. If ever the time should come in which the millennial age of the modern scientist shall be reached, he himself will be the first to proclaim that it has been reached by the accumulation and combination of all the events which have preceded it-prosperous and adverse, good and bad. He will tell the world of his day that the prosperity to which men have attained has been simply the last result of the whole foregoing panorama, the ultimate issue of that long train of circumstances which is called the course of time. He will make no distinction in his retrospective survey between the defects and the symmetries of nature. The defects

will themselves appear in the light of symmetries, because to the eye of the scientist they shall appear as workers in the building. Every step of the preceding evolution shall be found to have been a necessary step to the production of the actual goal. The absence of aught which seemed a blemish, the leaving out of anything which was called a defect, shall be regarded by him as an impossible conception. He will be constrained to say in scientific retrospect what an apostle said in religious faith— that all things have worked together for good. If modern science is optimistic at all, it must be optimistic all through. It cannot be hopeful about the whole without being sanguine about the part, for the very marrow of its doctrine is the belief that the whole is involved in the part. It cannot be optimistic regarding the future without being optimistic in relation to the passing hour, for it is itself based on the principle that the future sleeps in the present, and that the passing hour enfolds the germ of the completed day.1

And, to tell this was the message of Greece. That she told it in rough language is true; that she expressed herself very badly is undoubted; but beneath the grotesqueness of the form there abides the spirit of that truth which she meant to convey. It is a truth unique amongst the messages of religions.

1 All this is conceded even by such a negative writer as Lange in his 'History of Materialism.'

Hitherto the creeds of men had deified the objects of life after having lifted them out of life; they first idealised them and then crowned them. But here the objects of life are crowned without being idealised; they are crowned as they are-in all their present forms, and with all their present imperfections. The Greek has put his hand upon the world as it is struggling, commonplace, unfinished. He has uncovered his head before the aspect of nature which meets him every day, before the events which befall him every hour, and he has not scrupled to assign divinity to the images of creation as they actually float before him. In so doing, he has supplied a desideratum in the objects of religious worship. Religious worship had deified everything but the common day. It had deified the past in China; it had deified the future in Persia; it had deified even the hour of death in the Buddhism of India; but it had put no crown upon the objects and the events of the living hour. It was reserved for Greece to supply the want in the temple of humanity, and by this she, being dead, yet speaketh.

CHAPTER X.

THE MESSAGE OF ROME.

I REGARD the Roman religion as the earliest attempt at religious union. Its distinctive message to the world was to proclaim the possibility of destroying the distinctive, of erasing those lines of demarcation which tend to divide the faiths of men. From the very beginning, from the very constitution of her nature, Rome sought a principle of eclecticisma principle which should unite and rivet the lives of the multitude. In every department of her history she pursued the same end; her religious instinct only moved in unison with her national reason. surely as on the life of the bee there is imprinted the necessity to construct an incorporative hive, there was from the outset imprinted on the Roman constitution the necessity to construct an incorporative empire-an empire which in its extent and its vastness might yet leave room for the action of many powers within it. The unity at which Rome aimed was not a uniformity. She did not seek

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