deny that the Hellenic soil brought forth some choice fruits. It nourished a heroic patriotism which still, after the lapse of two thousand years, makes the pulse bound at the names of Marathon and Thermopyla; it covered the land with the most lovely creations of art, and in the wide sphere of intellectual achievement it erected monuments that will last while the world endures. But the genius of Greece lamentably failed when it came to expound the relations of God to man; its force was destructive, but not constructive. It exploded the airy fabrics of primeval nature-worship; it expelled the Dryads from the woods and the Naiads from the fountains; it dethroned the Thunderer, and turned the laugh against gloomy Dis but it could not construct a new religion; it failed utterly to erect any bulwark against the tide of human passion, and did not stop for a day the decay of Grecian morals. Greek philosophy, at its best, could only speculate darkly on the existence of a God; whether He was one or many, whether He cared for man or no, whether His empire were righteous or unrighteous, were merely questions of dialectics, and had no moral influence on the

mass of the people. All the wisdom of the Greeks, from Thales to Plutarch, discovered less of the Divine character than we find in the Sermon on the Mount, and it effected less for the advancement of piety than a single letter of St. Paul. The decline of Greece is, indeed, one of the saddest pages of history. It bloomed for a briet era with uncommon splendour; but the flower concealed a canker worm, and Hellenic civilization was quenched in a night of Cimmerian darkness, and perished amid vices which the pen of the historian refuses to describe.

The efflorescence of Rom in civilization was a weaker copy of that of Greece. The philosophy of Rome was second-hand, and Cicero and Seneca reproduced in a Roman dress the best thoughts of the Academy and the Porch. The most influential school of Roman moralists was that of the Stoics, and amid the wreck and crash of a falling State, they exhibited a sublime equanimity. But their system was cold and hard; it inculcated no love of humanity, far less a love of God. The Stoic enwrapped himself in a shroud of indifference, and, regarding the world with contempt, rejoiced

that he could leave it when he chose by the act of self-destruction. Stoicism, if it be worthy of the name of a religion, was never fitted to go beyond a small school of philosophers, and scarcely even rippled the surface of social life. When Roman literature and philosophy were at their zenith, the morals of the people were decaying. The Augustan era was one of practical Atheism, and if we wish to revert to the purest times of Rome, we must go back to the infancy of the commonwealth, when great questions of State policy were determined by the aspect of a calf's liver or the feeding of the sacred chickens. The early days of Rome were days of genuine belief, but it was belief in childish superstitions. Its later days replaced these superstitions by a refined philosophy, but so far from conducting its people to a purer civilization, the nation became more and more corrupt, till the primal laws of Nature were set at nought and a seething mass of corruption engendered, which the pen of the great Apostle has delineated in that most awful of all recitals of human wickedness-the first chapter of Romans.

If Greek and Roman history teach anything, it

proves that "when men do not like to retain God in their knowledge, they are given over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient." And Rome in the time of Tiberius and Nero reads the same lesson as Paris in the days of the Commune. A godless philosophy can never lay solid foundations for human virtue, and in its attempt to do without God, will only bring forth a monstrous abortion.

In this rapid review of heathen religions we have not thought it needful to refer in detail to all the nations of antiquity. The ancient civilization of Egypt and Assyria shows as few traces of a pure theology as that of India and China. Persia is distinguished by the great name of Zoroaster, around whom has gathered a halo of legend, like the mythical renown of Brahma and Buddha, but all that we can learn of religion from its modern representatives, the Parsees, proves that it has no more power to regenerate mankind, or even to enforce a virtuous life, than the Buddhist or Brahminical systems.

We find then that all the civilized nations of antiquity were without a true knowledge of God. Neither the light of nature, nor the light of con

science conducted them to a religion of holiness. They made no progress in finding out the truth as concerning God's relations to man; their philosophy was powerless to enforce morality, and their civilization contained the fatal germs of decay; so that when we look back on the ancient world, we see wave after wave of humanity breaking, and disappearing on the barren rocks of human speculation. The process is ever the same. Certain crude notions of the Divine are projected from man's consciousness, but they have no foundation in positive truth, and are successively swept away by the tide of time, leaving the race as poor in moral and spiritual intelligence as their remote ancestors.

But do we find that the savage races of the globe have succeeded better in the quest after God? Do we find anywhere traces of primeval innocence among them, or purer and holier notions of the Divine character than the civilized nations of antiquity developed? It once was a dream of sophists that man in the savage state was comparatively pure, but the close researches of modern investigators have made it only too plain that the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations