upon. The immortality of the soul is regarded as a truth of revelation. Nature does not teach it. The considerations ordinarily adduced in proof of it go no further than to remove objections. They do not afford any good ground for belief in the doctrine. Although these strictures are in the main undoubtedly just, we think too little weight is allowed to the argument drawn from the apparent discordance in many instances between the treatment which men experience in this world and their actual deserts.

Mr. Bowen's ethics are much better than his metaphysics. To all the leading doctrines contained in this part of the work we yield a cordial assent. Nothing could be more just or more forcible than his exposition of the moral law, as revealed in the conscience. Its authority is absolute and uncompromising. It admits of no bending to circumstances-no accommodation with interest. It wholly ignores expediency. The obligations of right transcend all other obligations.

When

duty utters her voice, the clamors of passion must be hushed, and the demands of self-love even be disregarded. The moral tone of the entire volume is unusually elevated, and its spirit throughout is loyal to the great interests of virtue, humanity, and truth. Although containing, as we think, some grave errors, the just sentiments which everywhere pervade it do much toward atoning for them. Of its literary merit we have already expressed our high appreciation. With entire philosophical accuracy of thought, there are combined a freedom and beauty of expression which are rarely equalled in writings of this character. If in respect to style there be any ground offered for criticism, it will perhaps be found in the too frequent employment of figurative language. Trope and metaphor are undoubtedly favorable to vivacity, and often enable the writer to express his ideas with a clearness and force quite unattainable by the use of proper terms. At the same time, they are liable, like refracting prisms, to color and distort the objects which are seen through them.

ART. VI.-PAUL AT ATHENS:

THE RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE GReeks.

FEW spectacles furnish matter of speculation more deeply interesting than that of Paul in Athens. The great Apostle of Christianity stands in the very sanctuary of Paganism, where taste and genius, literature and art, had shed over its rites and doctrines their most seductive charms. He who had been specially chosen to lead the conflict in which the infant Christianity had engaged against the hoary and gigantic systems of Polytheism, was now called to face the foe in the very citadel of her strength, on the ground where her largest resources had been gathered, where her noblest triumphs had been achieved. Not even Imperial Rome in her palmiest days, when her invincible legions held in awe the whole civilized world, was so formidable a foe to Christianity, so powerful a champion of idolatry, as learned, refined, and philosophic Athens, even when all her political greatness had passed

away.

Paul was a man of taste and cultivation. All his writings breathe not only the most fervid zeal, but the tenderest sensibility; and his discourse before the Areopagus, independently of its allusions to the Greek poets, evinces in the singular dignity of its tone, and propriety of its sentiments, a mind of enlarged culture and genuine refinement; a mind, which, though not perhaps deeply versed in the false wisdom of the Grecian schools, was abundantly capable of appreciating whatever was profound in truth, noble in action, or beautiful in art and letters. Paul therefore, we may be assured, was far from being an indifferent spectator of the scenes which met his view in this celebrated seat of the Muses. He did not wander listlessly through the streets of a city which had stood for five hundred years the intellectual metropolis of the world. He felt, no doubt, and gratified a legitimate curiosity. He ascended the marble staircase, and passed beneath the stately portico which opened upon the teeming wonders of the Acropolis. He entered the Parthenon, and stood for a moment spell-bound by the magic of art, before the colossal statue of the Tutelar Minerva. He trod the halls of the Lyceum, and mused amidst the olive groves of the Academy. He visited the Pnyx and the Dionysium,-places hallowed by the sublimest exhibitions of genius and patriotism, where over the

assembled populace of Athens had so often rolled the burning tide of eloquence and song.

What then were the emotions which swelled the bosom of Paul in view of this gorgeous spectacle? Did he surrender himself for the time being to the "genius loci," and allow his imagination to revel delighted and unrestrained amidst the glorious scenes of the present, and the still more glorious recollections of the past? Did he forget for the moment that he was Christ's ambassador to a guilty and condemned world, and join the paan which swelled in homage to the magnificent creatures of sculpture and poesy-the gods on whom the verse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias had united in bestowing immortality? Nothing of this. That Paul was insensible to the extraordinary beauty of the products of art and genius by which he was surrounded, we have not the slightest reason for believing; and just as little that he was ignorant of those achievements of valor, patriotism, and intellect, which had made Athens the glory of the world. Yet all these things held but a very subordinate place in his esteem. They were at best but the outward trappings and adornments of humanity. They reached not the vital elements of human character and destiny. They could not hide from his view the moral degradation and wretchedness which lay hid beneath this outward show of splendor. Paul could not forget that the art, the genius, the learning, the enterprise, whose monuments clustered so thickly around him, had lavished their resources in the service of irreligion; lending a false and baleful lustre to a system intrinsically false and loathsome; and thus enriveting on the world the fetters of a most debasing moral bondage.

It was not then because Paul was a narrow-minded bigot, insensible to the attractions of genius and taste, that these attractions in the present case took so slight a hold upon his mind. It was because that mind had been illuminated with a holier light than was ever shed on the speculations of Grecian sages; because his soul had become the abode of loftier truths than had ever visited the visions of their most favored hours. Looking, therefore, from a high moral position, he could estimate at their true value the scenes on which he gazed. To his purified vision all these wonders of art and genius were the product of a people who knew not God, and were proofs of a deplorable estrangement from the Supreme Ruler and Benefactor, the Being in whom they lived, and whose bounty filled their hearts with food and gladness. Can we then wonder that the prevailing sentiment in the breast of

the Apostle was melancholy-a melancholy profound precisely in proportion to the intellectual elevation of a people whose moral state was so deplorable? Wise as they deemed themselves-wise as in all earthly sense they were-they had failed to attain to true wisdom. On the subjects which are of profoundest interest to humanity, on questions which the highest instincts of man's nature most urgently propound, they groped in an almost rayless night. While their restless and daring intellects had explored almost every tract in the wide domain of error, they had failed to lift the veil which overhung the realm of truth. Ten thousand mocking phantoms had been pursued with impetuous eagerness, but the one heavenly form had never come within their grasp. What more melancholy than to see a people, great in almost every element of earthly greatness, wise in almost every attribute of human wisdom, yet on subjects of universally acknowledged and most momentous interest, the slaves of error equally puerile and destructive? A people that had shaken off the fetters of political and mental vassalage, and in arts and arms and letters was running a glorious career which was to render them the admiration of all coming time, yet the victims of a moral servitude the most abject and debasing? Never so clearly as in the speculations of ancient Greece was demonstrated the great truth that "the world by wisdom knew not God;" that the most gigantic efforts of human reason utterly fail to solve the great problem of human destiny, and penetrate the mysteries of eternal truth; and that without a revelation from God, man is doomed to the most blinding and destructive errors.

But let us hold aside for a little the veil, and look in upon the moral and religious life of antiquity. Our attention is at once arrested by the fact that the Greeks were a nation of idolaters. They had forsaken the service, and even lost the knowledge of the true God, and were bowing to images wrought by their own hands, or existing only in their depraved imaginations. In return for the countless benefits of Jehovah's hand, they sent up to him no grateful acknowledgments. They had transferred their allegiance from their Creator and rightful Sovereign to the creation-to the works of his hands, or more degrading still, of their own. They had bowed their lofty intellects before the sun and stars, before brutes and reptiles, before senseless forms of gold and marble, and thus in the most explicit manner disowned the sway of the One Eternal and Supreme. Idolatry, it should be remembered, is a direct and open denial of God, and is thus the most awful crime which creatures can commit. It is the very acme

of impiety-the utmost limit to which human wickedness can reach. It is not merely a speculative denial of God, like that of the theoretical Atheist; not merely a virtual denial of him, like that of the thoughtless, reckless votary of sense; but it is both these, and more. It is a positive, active, aggressive denial of him, carried out with a systematic endeavor to strip him of all his rightful honors, and to exalt into an impious usurpation of his throne the basest and vilest creations of his creatures. No wonder that impiety so flagrant and daring is everywhere stamped by Jehovah with the brand of his peculiar abhorrence. No wonder that their frequent lapses into idolatry called down upon his chosen people the most awful of his curses. What could be more provoking to the infinitely Excellent and Holy One, than to see the people whom he had called to be peculiarly his own, to whom he had condescended to sustain the relation of king, deliberately and formally turning their backs upon him, disowning his beneficent sway, and rendering to the sun and moon, to an ox or a calf, nay, to some foul and horrid demon of the pit, the worship which was rightfully his own? The idolatry of the Gentiles might indeed be less aggravated in the degree of its guilt, but it lost nothing of its intrinsic loathsomeness and wickedness by the universality and duration of its sway.

Here then was the primordial sin of the Greeks-the fountain of bitterness whose poisonous streams shed their blighting influence over their entire character. The Greeks were devoted, greedy idolaters. They had shared in that general estrangement from God, and dislike to retain him in their knowledge, which had plunged almost the whole world into the abominations of a false and lying worship. Not the most ignorant and degraded among all the nations whom they stigmatized as barbarians, outstripped this polished and intellectual people in devotion to the rites of Polytheism. They had multiplied their deities till they embraced almost every object in nature, and almost every variety of human conception. They translated to the skies almost every vile attribute and passion of humanity; they honored with an apotheosis every hero who distinguished himself by his prowess against man or beast. Some deities were invoked to obtain their favor, and others to deprecate their wrath; some because they were dreaded as foes to mankind, others because they were honored as friends. They paid homage to gods who presided over war, drunkenness, adultery, theft, envy and revenge. Their idolatrous system was deeply imbedded in all the usages and institutions of society; it was linked with all the sacred asso