Memorials and Other Papers Part 6

It is remarkable--and, without a previous explanation, it might seem paradoxical to say it--that oftentimes under a continual accession of light important subjects grow more and more enigmatical. In times when nothing was explained, the student, torpid as his teacher, saw nothing which called for explanation--all appeared one monotonous blank. But no sooner had an early twilight begun to solicit the creative faculties of the eye, than many dusky objects, with outlines imperfectly defined, began to converge the eye, and to strengthen the nascent interest of the spectator. It is true that light, in its final plenitude, is calculated to disperse all darkness. But this effect belongs to its consummation. In its earlier and _struggling_ states, light does but reveal darkness. It makes the darkness palpable and "visible." Of which we may see a sensible ill.u.s.tration in a gloomy gla.s.s-house, where the sullen l.u.s.tre from the furnace does but ma.s.s and acc.u.mulate the thick darkness in the rear upon which the moving figures are relieved.

Or we may see an intellectual ill.u.s.tration in the mind of the savage, on whose blank surface there exists no doubt or perplexity at all, none of the pains connected with ignorance; he is conscious of no darkness, simply because for _him_ there exists no visual ray of speculation--no vestige of prelusive light.

Similar, and continually more similar, has been the condition of ancient history. Once yielding a mere barren crop of facts and dates, slowly it has been kindling of late years into life and deep interest under superior treatment. And hitherto, as the light has advanced, _pari pa.s.su_ have the ma.s.ses of darkness strengthened. Every question solved has been the parent of three new questions unmasked.

And the power of breathing life into dry bones has but seemed to multiply the skeletons and lifeless remains; for the very natural reason--that these dry bones formerly (whilst viewed as incapable of revivification) had seemed less numerous, because everywhere confounded to the eye with stocks and stones, so long as there was no motive of hope for marking the distinction between them.

Amongst all the ill.u.s.trations which might illuminate this truth, none is so instructive as the large question of PAGAN ORACLES. Every part, indeed, of the Pagan religion, the course, geographically or ethnographically, of its traditions, the vast labyrinth of its mythology, the deductions of its contradictory genealogies, the disputed meaning of its many secret "mysteries" [_teletai_-- symbolic rites or initiations], all these have been submitted of late years to the scrutiny of gla.s.ses more powerful, applied under more combined arrangements, and directed according to new principles more comprehensively framed. We cannot in sincerity affirm--always with immediate advantage. But even where the individual effort may have been a failure as regarded the immediate object, rarely, indeed, it has happened but that much indirect illumination has resulted--which, afterwards entering into combination with other scattered currents of light, has issued in discoveries of value; although, perhaps, any one contribution, taken separately, had been, and would have remained, inoperative. Much has been accomplished, chiefly of late years; and, confining our view to ancient history, almost exclusively amongst the Germans--by the Savignys, the Niebuhrs, the Otfried Muellers. And, if that _much_ has left still more to do, it has also brought the means of working upon a scale of far accelerated speed.

The books now existing upon the ancient oracles, above all, upon the Greek oracles, amount to a small library. The facts have been collected from all quarters,--examined, sifted, winnowed. Theories have been raised upon these facts under every angle of aspect; and yet, after all, we profess ourselves to be dissatisfied. Amongst much that is sagacious, we feel and we resent with disgust a taint of falsehood diffused over these recent speculations from vulgar and even counterfeit incredulity; the one gross vice of German philosophy, not less determinate or less misleading than that vice which, heretofore, through many centuries, had impoverished this subject, and had stopped its discussion under the anile superst.i.tion of the ecclesiastical fathers.

These fathers, both Greek and Latin, had the ill fortune to be extravagantly esteemed by the church of Rome; whence, under a natural reaction, they were systematically depreciated by the great leaders of the Protestant Reformation. And yet hardly in a corresponding degree.

For there was, after all, even among the reformers, a deep-seated prejudice in behalf of all that was "primitive" in Christianity; under which term, by some confusion of ideas, the fathers often benefited.

Primitive Christianity was reasonably venerated; and, on this argument, that, for the first three centuries, it was necessarily more sincere.

We do not think so much of that sincerity which affronted the fear of persecution; because, after all, the searching persecutions were rare and intermitting, and not, perhaps, in any case, so fiery as they have been represented. We think more of that gentle but insidious persecution which lay in the solicitations of besieging friends, and more still of the continual temptations which haunted the irresolute Christian in the fascinations of the public amus.e.m.e.nts. The theatre, the circus, and, far beyond both, the cruel amphitheatre, const.i.tuted, for the ancient world, a pa.s.sionate enjoyment, that by many authors, and especially through one period of time, is described as going to the verge of frenzy. And we, in modern times, are far too little aware in what degree these great carnivals, together with another attraction of great cities, the pomps and festivals of the Pagan wors.h.i.+p, broke the monotony of domestic life, which, for the old world, was even more oppressive than it is for us. In all princ.i.p.al cities, so as to be within the reach of almost all provincial inhabitants, there was a hippodrome, often uniting the functions of the circus and the amphitheatre; and there was a theatre. From all such pleasures the Christian was sternly excluded by his very profession of faith. From the festivals of the Pagan religion his exclusion was even more absolute; against them he was a sworn militant protester from the hour of his baptism. And when these modes of pleasurable relaxation had been subtracted from ancient life, what could remain? Even less, perhaps, than most readers have been led to consider. For the ancients had no such power of extensive locomotion, of refreshment for their wearied minds, by travelling and change of scene, as we children of modern civilization possess. No s.h.i.+ps had then been fitted up for pa.s.sengers, nor public carriages established, nor roads opened extensively, nor hotels so much as imagined hypothetically; because the relation of _xenia_, or the obligation to reciprocal hospitality, and latterly the Roman relation of patron and client, had stifled the first motions of enterprise of the ancients; in fact, no man travelled but the soldier, and the man of political authority. Consequently, in sacrificing public amus.e.m.e.nts, the Christians sacrificed _all_ pleasure whatsoever that was not rigorously domestic; whilst in facing the contingencies of persecutions that might arise under the rapid succession of changing emperors, they faced a perpetual _anxiety_ more trying to the fort.i.tude than any fixed and measurable evil. Here, certainly, we have a guarantee for the deep faithfulness of early Christians, such as never can exist for more mixed bodies of professors, subject to no searching trials.

Better the primitive Christians were (by no means individually better, but better on the total body), yet they were not in any intellectual sense wiser. Unquestionably the elder Christians partic.i.p.ated in the local follies, prejudices, superst.i.tions, of their several provinces and cities, except where any of these happened to be too conspicuously at war with the spirit of love or the spirit of purity which exhaled at every point from the Christian faith; and, in all intellectual features, as were the Christians generally, such were the fathers.

Amongst the Greek fathers, one might be unusually learned, as Clement of Alexandria; and another might be reputed unusually eloquent, as Gregory n.a.z.ianzen, or Basil. Amongst the Latin fathers, one might be a man of admirable genius, as far beyond the poor, vaunted Rousseau in the impa.s.sioned grandeur of his thoughts, as he was in truth and purity of heart; we speak of St. Augustine (usually called St. Austin), and many might be distinguished by various literary merits. But could these advantages antic.i.p.ate a higher civilization? Most unquestionably some of the fathers were the _elite_ of their own age, but not in advance of their age. They, like all their contemporaries, were besieged by errors, ancient, inveterate, traditional; and accidentally, from one cause special to themselves, they were not merely liable to error, but usually p.r.o.ne to error. This cause lay in the _polemic_ form which so often they found a necessity, or a convenience, or a temptation for a.s.suming, as teachers or defenders of the truth.

He who reveals a body of awful truth to a candid and willing auditory is content with the grand simplicities of truth in the quality of his proofs. And truth, where it happens to be of a high order, is generally its own witness to all who approach it in the spirit of childlike docility. But far different is the position of that teacher who addresses an audience composed in various proportions of sceptical inquirers, obstinate opponents, and malignant scoffers. Less than an apostle is unequal to the suppression of all human reactions incident to wounded sensibilities. Scorn is too naturally met by retorted scorn: malignity in the Pagan, which characterized all the known cases of signal opposition to Christianity, could not but hurry many good men into a vindictive pursuit of victory. Generally, where truth is communicated _polemically_ (this is, not as it exists in its own inner simplicity, but as it exists in external relation to error), the temptation is excessive to use those arguments which will tell at the moment upon the crowd of bystanders, by preference to those which will approve themselves ultimately to enlightened disciples. Hence it is, that, like the professional rhetoricians of Athens, not seldom the Christian fathers, when urgently pressed by an antagonist equally mendacious and ignorant, could not resist the human instinct for employing arguments such as would baffle and confound the unprincipled opponent, rather than such as would satisfy the mature Christian. If a man denied himself all specious arguments, and all artifices of dialectic subtlety, he must renounce the hopes of a _present_ triumph; for the light of absolute truth on moral or on spiritual themes is too dazzling to be sustained by the diseased optics of those habituated to darkness. And hence we explain not only the many gross delusions of the fathers, their sophisms, their errors of fact and chronology, their attempts to build great truths upon fantastic etymologies, or upon popular conceits in science that have long since exploded, but also their occasional unchristian tempers. To contend with an unprincipled and malicious liar, such as Julian the Apostate, in its original sense the first deliberate _miscreant_, offered a dreadful snare to any man's charity. And he must be a furious bigot who will justify the rancorous lampoons of Gregory n.a.z.ianzen. Are we, then, angry on behalf of Julian? So far as _he_ was interested, not for a moment would we have suspended the descending scourge. Cut him to the bone, we should have exclaimed at the time! Lay the knout into every "raw" that can be found! For we are of opinion that Julian's duplicity is not yet adequately understood. But what was right as regarded the claims of the criminal, was _not_ right as regarded the duties of his opponent. Even in this mischievous renegade, trampling with his orangoutang hoofs the holiest of truths, a Christian bishop ought still to have respected his sovereign, through the brief period that he _was_ such, and to have commiserated his benighted brother, however wilfully astray, and however hatefully seeking to quench that light for other men, which, for his own misgiving heart, we could undertake to show that he never _did_ succeed in quenching. We do not wish to enlarge upon a theme both copious and easy. But here, and everywhere, speaking of the fathers as a body, we charge them with anti-christian practices of a two-fold order: sometimes as supporting their great cause in a spirit alien to its own, retorting in a temper not less uncharitable than that of their opponents; sometimes, again, as adopting arguments that are unchristian in their ultimate grounds; resting upon errors the reputation of errors; upon superst.i.tions the overthrow of superst.i.tions; and drawing upon the armories of darkness for weapons that, to be durable, ought to have been of celestial temper. Alternately, in short, the fathers trespa.s.s against those affections which furnish to Christianity its moving powers, and against those truths which furnish to Christianity its guiding lights. Indeed, Milton's memorable attempt to characterize the fathers as a body, contemptuous as it is, can hardly be challenged as overcharged.

Never in any instance were these aberrations of the fathers more vividly exemplified than in their theories upon the Pagan Oracles. On behalf of G.o.d, they were determined to be wiser than G.o.d; and, in demonstration of scriptural power, to advance doctrines which the Scriptures had nowhere warranted. At this point, however, we shall take a short course; and, to use a vulgar phrase, shall endeavor to "kill two birds with one stone." It happens that the earliest book in our modern European literature, which has subsequently obtained a station of authority on the subject of the ancient Oracles, applied itself entirely to the erroneous theory of the fathers. This is the celebrated _Antonii Van Dale, "De Ethnicorum Oraculis Dissertationes_," which was published at Amsterdam _at least_ as early as the year 1682; that is, one hundred and sixty years ago. And upon the same subject there has been no subsequent book which maintains an equal rank. Van Dale might have treated his theme simply with a view to the investigation of the truth, as some recent inquirers have preferred doing; and, in that case, the fathers would have been noticed only as incidental occasions might bring forward their opinions--true or false.

But to this author the errors of the fathers seemed capital; worthy, in fact, of forming his _princ.i.p.al_ object; and, knowing their great authority in the Papal church, he antic.i.p.ated, in the plan of attaching his own views to the false views of the fathers, an opening to a double patronage--that of the Protestants, in the first place, as interested in all doctrines seeming to be anti-papal; that of the sceptics, in the second place, as interested in the exposure of whatever had once commanded, but subsequently lost, the superst.i.tious reverence of mankind. On this policy, he determined to treat the subject polemically. He fastened, therefore, upon the fathers with a deadly _acharnement_, that evidently meant to leave no arrears of work for any succeeding a.s.sailant; and it must be acknowledged that, simply in relation to this purpose of hostility, his work is triumphant. So much was not difficult to accomplish; for barely to enunciate the leading doctrine of the fathers is, in the ear of any chronologist, to overthrow it. But, though successful enough in its functions of destruction, on the other hand, as an affirmative or constructive work, the long treatise of Van Dale is most unsatisfactory. It leaves us with a hollow sound ringing in the ear, of malicious laughter from gnomes and imps grinning over the weaknesses of man--his paralytic facility in believing--his fraudulent villany in abusing this facility--but in no point accounting for those real effects of diffusive social benefits from the Oracle machinery, which must arrest the attention of candid students, amidst some opposite monuments of incorrigible credulity, or of elaborate imposture.

As a book, however, belonging to that small cycle (not numbering, perhaps, on _all_ subjects, above three score), which may be said to have moulded and controlled the public opinion of Europe through the last five generations, already for itself the work of Van Dale merits a special attention. It is confessedly the _cla.s.sical_ book--the original _fundus_ for the arguments and facts applicable to this question; and an accident has greatly strengthened its authority.

Fontenelle, the most fas.h.i.+onable of European authors, at the opening of the eighteenth century, writing in a language at that time even more predominant than at present, did in effect employ all his advantages to propagate and popularize the views of Van Dale. Scepticism naturally courts the patronage of France; and in effect that same remark which a learned Belgian (Van Brouwer) has found frequent occasion to make upon single sections of Fontenelle's work, may be fairly extended into a representative account of the whole--"_L'on trouve les memes arguments chez Fontenelle, mais degages des longueurs du savant Van Dale, et exprimes avec plus d'elegance._" This _rifaccimento_ did not injure the original work in reputation: it caused Van Dale to be less read, but to be more esteemed; since a man confessedly distinguished for his powers of composition had not thought it beneath his ambition to adopt and recompose Van Dale's theory. This important position of Van Dale with regard to the effectual creed of Europe--so that, whether he were read directly or were slighted for a more fas.h.i.+onable expounder, equally in either case it was _his_ doctrines which prevailed--must always confer a circ.u.mstantial value upon the original dissertations, "_De Ethnicorum Oraculis_."

This original work of Van Dale is a book of considerable extent. But, in spite of its length, it divides substantially into two great chapters, and no more, which coincide, in fact, with the two separate dissertations. The first of these dissertations, occupying one hundred and eighty-one pages, inquires into the failure and extinction of the Oracles; when they failed, and under what circ.u.mstances. The second of these dissertations inquires into the machinery and resources of the Oracles during the time of their prosperity. In the first dissertation, the object is to expose the folly and gross ignorance of the fathers, who insisted on representing the history of the case roundly in this shape--as though all had prospered with the Oracles up to the nativity of Christ; but that, after his crucifixion, and simultaneously with the first promulgation of Christianity, all Oracles had suddenly drooped; or, to tie up their language to the rigor of their theory, had suddenly expired. All this Van Dale peremptorily denies; and, in these days, it is scarcely requisite to add, triumphantly denies; the whole hypothesis of the fathers having literally not a leg to stand upon; and being, in fact, the most audacious defiance to historical records that, perhaps, the annals of human folly present.

In the second dissertation, Van Dale combats the other notion of the fathers--that, during their prosperous ages, the Oracles had moved by an agency of evil spirits. He, on the contrary, contends that, from the first hour to the last of their long domination over the minds and practice of the Pagan world, they had moved by no agencies whatever, but those of human fraud, intrigue, collusion, applied to human blindness, credulity, and superst.i.tion.

We shall say a word or two upon each question. As to the first, namely, _when_ it was that the Oracles fell into decay and silence, thanks to the headlong rashness of the Fathers, Van Dale's a.s.sault cannot be refused or evaded. In reality, the evidence against them is too flagrant and hyperbolical. If we were to quote from Juvenal--"Delphis et Oracula cessant," in that case, the fathers challenge it as an argument on _their_ side, for that Juvenal described a state of things immediately posterior to Christianity; yet even here the word _cessant_ points to a distinction of cases which already in itself is fatal to their doctrine. By _cessant_ Juvenal means evidently what we, in these days, should mean in saying of a s.h.i.+p in action that her fire was slackening. This powerful poet, therefore, wiser so far than the Christian fathers, distinguishes two separate cases: first, the state of torpor and languis.h.i.+ng which might be (and in fact was) the predicament of many famous Oracles through centuries not fewer than five, six, or even eight; secondly, the state of absolute dismantling and utter extinction which, even before his time, had confounded individual Oracles of the inferior cla.s.s, not from changes affecting religion, whether true or false, but from political revolutions. Here, therefore, lies the first blunder of the fathers, that they confound with total death the long drooping which befell many great Oracles from languor in the popular sympathies, under changes hereafter to be noticed; and, consequently, from revenues and machinery continually decaying. That the Delphic Oracle itself--of all oracles the most ill.u.s.trious--had not expired, but simply slumbered for centuries, the fathers might have been convinced themselves by innumerable pa.s.sages in authors contemporary with themselves; and that it was continually throwing out fitful gleams of its ancient power, when any very great man (suppose a Caesar) thought fit to stimulate its latent vitality, is notorious from such cases as that of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found it but too clear- sighted; and it was no contempt in him, but too ghastly a fear and jealousy, which labored to seal up the grander ministrations of the Oracle for the future. What the Pythia had foreshown to himself, she might foreshow to others; and, when tempted by the same princely bribes, she might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views in other great officers. Thus, in the new condition of the Roman power, there was a perpetual peril, lest an oracle, so potent as that of Delphi, should absolutely create rebellions, by first suggesting hopes to men in high commands. Even as it was, all treasonable a.s.sumptions of the purple, for many generations, commenced in the hopes inspired by auguries, prophecies, or sortileges. And had the great Delphic Oracle, consecrated to men's feelings by h.o.a.ry superst.i.tion, and _privileged by secrecy_, come forward to countersign such hopes, many more would have been the wrecks of ambition, and even bloodier would have been the blood-polluted line of the imperial successions. Prudence, therefore, it was, and state policy, not the power of Christianity, which gave the _final_ shock (of the _original_ shock we shall speak elsewhere) to the grander functions of the Delphic Oracle. But, in the mean time, the humbler and more domestic offices of this oracle, though naturally making no noise at a distance, seem long to have survived its state relations. And, apart from the sort of galvanism notoriously applied by Hadrian, surely the fathers could not have seen Plutarch's account of its condition, already a century later than our Saviour's nativity. The Pythian priestess, as we gather from _him_, had by that time become a less select and dignified personage; she was no longer a princess in the land--a change which was proximately due to the impoverished income of the temple; but she was still in existence; still held in respect; still trained, though at inferior cost, to her difficult and showy ministrations. And the whole establishment of the Delphic G.o.d, if necessarily contracted from that scale which had been suitable when great kings and commonwealths were constant suitors within the gates of Delphi, still clung (like the Venice of modern centuries) to her old ancestral honors, and kept up that decent household of ministers which corresponded to the altered ministrations of her temple. In fact, the evidences on behalf of Delphi as a princely house, that had indeed partaken in the decaying fortunes of Greece, but naturally was all the prouder from the irritating contrast of her great remembrances, are so plentifully dispersed through books, that the fathers must have been willingly duped. That in some way they _were_ duped is too notorious from the facts, and might be suspected even from their own occasional language; take, as one instance, amongst a whole _harmony_ of similar expressions, this short pa.s.sage from Eusebius--_hoi h.e.l.lenes h.o.m.ologentes ekleloipenai auton ta chresteria_: the Greeks admitting that their Oracles have failed. (There is, however, a disingenuous vagueness in the very word _ekleloipenai_), _ed' allote pote ex aionos_--and when? why, at no other crisis through the total range of their existence--_e kata tes chrones tes euangelikes didaskalias_--than precisely at the epoch of the evangelical dispensation, etc. Eusebius was a man of too extensive reading to be entirely satisfied with the Christian representations upon this point.

And in such indeterminate phrases as _kata tes chrones_ (which might mean indifferently the entire three centuries then accomplished from the first promulgation of Christianity, or specifically that narrow punctual limit of the earliest promulgation), it is easy to trace an ambidextrous artifice of compromise between what would satisfy his own brethren, on the one hand, and what, on the other hand, he could hope to defend against the a.s.saults of learned Pagans.

In particular instances it is but candid to acknowledge that the fathers may have been misled by the remarkable tendencies to error amongst the ancients, from their want of public journals, combined with territorial grandeur of empire. The greatest possible defect of harmony arises naturally in this way amongst ancient authors, locally remote from each other; but more especially in the post-christian periods, when reporting any aspects of change, or any results from a revolution variable and advancing under the vast varieties of the Roman empire.

Having no newspapers to effect a level amongst the inequalities and anomalies of their public experience in regard to the Christian revolution, when collected from innumerable tribes so widely differing as to civilization, knowledge, superst.i.tion, &c.; hence it happened that one writer could report with truth a change as having occurred within periods of ten to sixty years, which for some other province would demand a circuit of six hundred. For example, in Asia Minor, all the way from the sea coast to the Euphrates, towns were scattered having a dense population of Jews. Sometimes these were the most malignant opponents of Christianity; that is, wherever they happened to rest in the _letter_ of their peculiar religion. But, on the other hand, where there happened to be a majority (or, if not numerically a majority, yet influentially an overbalance) in that section of the Jews who were docile children of their own preparatory faith and discipline, no bigots, and looking anxiously for the fulfilment of their prophecies (an expectation at that time generally diffused),--under those circ.u.mstances, the Jews were such ready converts as to account naturally for sudden local transitions, which in other circ.u.mstances or places might not have been credible.

This single consideration may serve to explain the apparent contradictions, the irreconcilable discrepancies, between the statements of contemporary Christian bishops, locally at a vast distance from each other, or (which is even more important) reporting from communities occupying different stages of civilization. There was no harmonizing organ of interpretation, in Christian or in Pagan newspapers, to bridge over the chasms that divided different provinces.

A devout Jew, already possessed by the purest idea of the Supreme Being, stood on the very threshold of conversion: he might, by one hour's conversation with an apostle, be transfigured into an enlightened Christian; whereas a Pagan could seldom in one generation pa.s.s beyond the infirmity of his novitiate. His heart and affections, his will and the habits of his understanding, were too deeply diseased to be suddenly trans.m.u.ted. And hence arises a phenomenon, which has too languidly arrested the notice of historians; namely, that already, and for centuries before the time of Constantine, wherever the Jews had been thickly sown as colonists, the most potent body of Christian zeal stood ready to kindle under the first impulse of encouragement from the state; whilst in the great capitals of Rome and Alexandria, where the Jews were hated and neutralized politically by Pagan forces, not for a hundred years later than Constantine durst the whole power of the government lay hands on the Pagan machinery, except with timid precautions, and by graduations so remarkably adjusted to the circ.u.mstances, that sometimes they wear the shape of compromises with idolatry. We must know the ground, the quality of the population, concerned in any particular report of the fathers, before we can judge of its probabilities. Under local advantages, insulated cases of Oracles suddenly silenced, of temples and their idol-wors.h.i.+p overthrown, as by a rupture of new-born zeal, were not less certain to arise as rare accidents from rare privileges, or from rare coincidences of unanimity in the leaders of the place, than on the other hand they were certain _not_ to arise in that unconditional universality pretended by the fathers. Wheresoever Paganism was interwoven with the whole moral being of a people, as it was in Egypt, or with the political tenure and hopes of a people, as it was in Rome, _there_ a long struggle was inevitable before the revolution could be effected.

Briefly, as against the fathers, we find a sufficient refutation in what _followed_ Christianity. If, at a period five, or even six hundred years after the birth of Christ, you find people still consulting the local Oracles of Egypt, in places sheltered from the point-blank range of the state artillery,--there is an end, once and forever, to the delusive superst.i.tion that, merely by its silent presence in the world, Christianity must instantaneously come into fierce activity as a reagency of destruction to all forms of idolatrous error. That argument is multiplied beyond all power of calculation; and to have missed it is the most eminent instance of wilful blindness which the records of human folly can furnish. But there is another refutation lying in an opposite direction, which presses the fathers even more urgently in the rear than this presses them in front; any author posterior to Christianity, who should point to the decay of Oracles, they would claim on their own side. But what would they have said to Cicero,--by what resource of despair would they have parried his authority, when insisting (as many times he does insist), forty and even fifty years before the birth of Christ, on the languis.h.i.+ng condition of the Delphic Oracle? What evasion could they imagine here?

How could that languor be due to Christianity, which far antic.i.p.ated the very birth of Christianity? For, as to Cicero, who did not "far antic.i.p.ate the birth of Christianity." we allege _him_ rather because his work _De Divinatione_ is so readily accessible, and because his testimony on any subject is so full of weight, than because other and much older authorities cannot be produced to the same effect.

The Oracles of Greece had lost their vigor and their palmy pride full two centuries before the Christian era. Historical records show this _a posteriori_, whatever were the cause; and the cause, which we will state hereafter, shows it _a priori_, apart from the records.

Surely, therefore, Van Dale needed not to have pressed his victory over the helpless fathers so unrelentingly, and after the first ten pages by cases and proofs that are quite needless and _ex abundanti_; simply the survival of any one distinguished Oracle upwards of four centuries _after_ Christ--that is sufficient. But if with this fact we combine the other fact, that all the princ.i.p.al Oracles had already begun to languish, more than two centuries _before_ Christianity, there can be no opening for a whisper of dissent upon any real question between Van Dale and his opponents; namely, both as to the possibility of Christianity coexisting with such forms of error, and the possibility that oracles should be overthrown by merely Pagan, or internal changes. The less plausible, however, that we find this error of the fathers, the more curiosity we naturally feel about the source of that error; and the more so, because Van Dale never turns his eyes in that direction.

This source lay (to speak the simple truth) in abject superst.i.tion. The fathers conceived of the enmity between Christianity and Paganism, as though it resembled that between certain chemical poisons and the Venetian wine-gla.s.s, which (according to the belief [Footnote: Which belief we can see no reason for rejecting so summarily as is usually done in modern times. It would be absurd, indeed, to suppose a kind of gla.s.s qualified to expose all poisons indifferently, considering the vast range of their chemical differences. But, surely, as against that one poison then familiarly used for domestic murders, a chemical reagency might have been devised in the quality of the gla.s.s. At least, there is no _prima facie_ absurdity in such a supposition.] of three centuries back) no sooner received any poisonous fluid, than immediately it s.h.i.+vered into crystal splinters. They thought to honor Christianity, by imaging it as some exotic animal of more powerful breed, such as we English have witnessed in a domestic case, coming into instant collision with the native race, and exterminating it everywhere upon the first conflict. In this conceit they subst.i.tuted a foul fiction of their own, fas.h.i.+oned on the very model of Pagan fictions, for the unvarying a.n.a.logy of the divine procedure.

Christianity, as the last and consummate of revelations, had the high destination of working out its victory through what was greatest in a man--through his reason, his will, his affections. But, to satisfy the fathers, it must operate like a drug--like sympathetic powders--like an amulet--or like a conjurer's charm. Precisely the monkish effect of a Bible when hurled at an evil spirit--not the true rational effect of that profound oracle read, studied, and laid to heart--was that which the fathers ascribed to the mere proclamation of Christianity, when first piercing the atmosphere circ.u.mjacent to any oracle; and, in fact, to their gross appreciations, Christian truth was like the scavenger bird in Eastern climates, or the stork in Holland, which signalizes its presence by devouring all the native brood of vermin, or nuisances, as fast as they reproduce themselves under local distemperatures of climate or soil.

It is interesting to pursue the same ign.o.ble superst.i.tion, which, in fact, under Romish hands, soon crept like a parasitical plant over Christianity itself, until it had nearly strangled its natural vigor, back into times far preceding that of the fathers. Spite of all that could be wrought by Heaven, for the purpose of continually confounding the local vestiges of popular reverence which might have gathered round stocks and stones, so obstinate is the hankering after this mode of superst.i.tion in man that his heart returns to it with an elastic recoil as often as the openings are restored. Agreeably to this infatuation, the temple of the true G.o.d--even its awful _adytum_--the holy of holies--or the places where the ark of the covenant had rested in its migrations--all were conceived to have an eternal and a self- vindicating sanct.i.ty. So thought man: but G.o.d himself, though to man's folly pledged to the vindication of his own sanct.i.ties, thought far otherwise; as we know by numerous profanations of all holy places in Judea, triumphantly carried through, and avenged by no plausible judgments. To speak only of the latter temple, three men are memorable as having polluted its holiest recesses: Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey about a century later, and t.i.tus pretty nearly by the same exact interval later than Pompey. Upon which of these three did any judgment descend? Attempts have been made to impress that coloring of the sequel in two of these cases, indeed, but without effect upon _any_ man's mind. Possibly in the case of Antiochus, who seems to have moved under a burning hatred, not so much of the insurgent Jews as of the true faith which prompted their resistance, there is some colorable argument for viewing him in his miserable death as a monument of divine wrath.

But the two others had no such malignant spirit; they were tolerant, and even merciful; were authorized instruments for executing the purposes of Providence; and no calamity in the life of either can be reasonably traced to his dealings with Palestine. Yet, if Christianity could not brook for an instant the mere coexistence of a Pagan oracle, how came it that the Author of Christianity had thus brooked (nay, by many signs of cooperation, had promoted) that ultimate desecration, which planted "the abomination of desolation" as a victorious crest of Paganism upon his own solitary altar? The inst.i.tution of the Sabbath, again--what part of the Mosaic economy could it more plausibly have been expected that G.o.d should vindicate by some memorable interference, since of all the Jewish inst.i.tutions it was that one which only and which frequently became the occasion of wholesale butchery to the pious (however erring) Jews? The scruple of the Jews to fight, or even to resist an a.s.sa.s.sin, on the Sabbath, was not the less pious in its motive because erroneous in principle; yet no miracle interfered to save them from the consequences of their infatuation. And this seemed the more remarkable in the case of their war with Antiochus, because _that_ (if any that history has recorded) was a holy war. But, after one tragical experience, which cost the lives of a thousand martyrs, the Maccabees--quite as much on a level with their scrupulous brethren in piety as they were superior in good sense--began to reflect that they had no shadow of a warrant from Scripture for counting upon any miraculous aid; that the whole expectation, from first to last, had been human and presumptuous; and that the obligation of fighting valiantly against idolatrous compliances was, at all events, paramount to the obligation of the Sabbath. In one hour, after unyoking themselves from this monstrous millstone of their own forging, about their own necks, the cause rose buoyantly aloft as upon wings of victory; and, as their very earliest reward--as the first fruits from thus disabusing their minds of windy presumptions--they found the very case itself melting away which had furnished the scruple; since their cowardly enemies, now finding that they would fight on all days alike, had no longer any motive for attacking them on the Sabbath; besides that their own astonis.h.i.+ng victories henceforward secured to them often the choice of the day not less than of the ground.

But, without lingering on these outworks of the true religion, namely, 1st, the Temple of Jerusalem; 2dly, the Sabbath,--both of which the divine wisdom often saw fit to lay prostrate before the presumption of idolatrous a.s.saults, on principles utterly irreconcilable with the Oracle doctrine of the fathers,--there is a still more flagrant argument against the fathers, which it is perfectly confounding to find both them and their confuter overlooking. It is this. Oracles, take them at the very worst, were no otherwise hostile to Christianity than as a branch of Paganism. If, for instance, the Delphic establishment were hateful (as doubtless it was) to the holy spirit of truth which burned in the mind of an apostle, _why_ was it hateful? Not primarily in its character of Oracle, but in its universal character of Pagan temple; not as an authentic distributor of counsels adapted to the infinite situations of its clients--often very wise counsels; but as being ultimately engrafted on the stem of idolatrous religion--as deriving, in the last resort, their sanctions from Pagan deities, and, therefore, as sharing _constructively_ in all the pollutions of that tainted source. Now, therefore, if Christianity, according to the fancy of the fathers, could not tolerate the co-presence of so much evil as resided in the Oracle superst.i.tion,--that is, in the derivative, in the secondary, in the not unfrequently neutralized or even redundantly compensated mode of error,--then, _a fortiori_, Christianity could not have tolerated for an hour the parent superst.i.tion, the larger evil, the fontal error, which diseased the very organ of vision--which not merely distorted a few objects on the road, but spread darkness over the road itself. Yet what is the fact?

So far from any mysterious repulsion _externally_ between idolatrous errors and Christianity, as though the two schemes of belief could no more coexist in the same society than two queen-bees in a hive,--as though elementary nature herself recoiled from the abominable _concursus_,--do but open a child's epitome of history, and you find it to have required four entire centuries before the destroyer's hammer and crowbar began to ring loudly against the temples of idolatrous wors.h.i.+p; and not before five, nay, locally six, or even seven centuries had elapsed, could the better angel of mankind have sung gratulations announcing that the great strife was over--that man was inoculated with the truth; or have adopted the impressive language of a Latin father, that "the owls were to be heard in _every_ village hooting from the dismantled fanes of heathenism, or the gaunt wolf disturbing the sleep of peasants as he yelled in winter from the cold, dilapidated altars." Even this victorious consummation was true only for the southern world of civilization. The forests of Germany, though pierced already to the south in the third and fourth centuries by the torch of missionaries,--though already at that time illuminated by the immortal Gothic version of the New Testament preceding Ulppilas, and still surviving,--sheltered through ages in the north and east vast tribes of idolaters, some awaiting the baptism of Charlemagne in the eighth century and the ninth, others actually resuming a fierce countenance of heathenism for the martial zeal of crusading knights in the thirteenth and fourteenth. The history of Constantine has grossly misled the world. It was very early in the fourth century (313 A. D.) that Constantine found himself strong enough to take his _earliest_ steps for raising Christianity to a privileged station; which station was not merely an effect and monument of its progress, but a further cause of progress. In this latter light, as a power advancing and moving, but politically still militant, Christianity required exactly one other century to carry out and accomplish even its eastern triumph. Dating from the era of the very inaugurating and merely local acts of Constantine, we shall be sufficiently accurate in saying that the corresponding period in the fifth century (namely, from about 404 to 420 A. D.) first witnessed those uproars of ruin in Egypt and Alexandria--fire racing along the old carious timbers, battering- rams thundering against the ancient walls of the most horrid temples-- which rang so searchingly in the ears of Zosimus, extorting, at every blow, a howl of Pagan sympathy from that ignorant calumniator of Christianity. So far from the fact being, according to the general prejudice, as though Constantine had found himself able to destroy Paganism, and to replace it by Christianity; on the contrary, it was both because he happened to be far too weak, in fact, for such a mighty revolution, and because he _knew_ his own weakness, that he fixed his new capital, as a preliminary caution, upon the Propontis.

There were other motives to this change, and particularly (as we have attempted to show in a separate dissertation) motives of high political economy, suggested by the relative conditions of land and agriculture in Thrace and Asia Minor, by comparison with decaying Italy; but a paramount motive, we are satisfied, and the earliest motive, was the incurable Pagan bigotry of Rome. Paganism for Rome, it ought to have been remembered by historians, was a mere necessity of her Pagan origin. Paganism was the fatal dowry of Rome from her inauguration; not only she had once received a retaining fee on behalf of Paganism, in the mysterious _Ancile_, supposed to have fallen from heaven, but she actually preserved this bribe amongst her rarest jewels. She possessed a palladium, such a national amulet or talisman as many Grecian or Asiatic cities had once possessed--a _fatal_ guarantee to the prosperity of the state. Even the Sibylline books, whatever ravages they might be supposed by the intelligent to have sustained in a lapse of centuries, were popularly believed, in the latest period of the Western empire, to exist as so many charters of supremacy. Jupiter himself in Rome had put on a peculiar Roman physiognomy, which a.s.sociated him with the destinies of the gigantic state. Above all, the solemn augury of the twelve vultures, so memorably pa.s.sed downwards from the days of Romulus, through generations as yet uncertain of the event, and, therefore, chronologically incapable of partic.i.p.ation in any fraud--an augury _always_ explained as promising twelve centuries of supremacy to Rome, from the year 748 or 750 B. C.-- cooperated with the endless other Pagan superst.i.tions in anchoring the whole Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the _indefeasible_ privileges of the _Pontifex Maximus_, which (though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work, for many years sought to fight off the evidences for that fact, yet afterwards partially he confessed his error) actually availed--historically and _medallically_ can be demonstrated to have availed--for the temptation of Christian Caesars into collusive adulteries with heathenism. Here, for instance, came an emperor that timidly recorded his scruples--feebly protested, but gave way at once as to an ugly necessity. There came another, more deeply religious, or const.i.tutionally more bold, who fought long and strenuously against the compromise. "What! should he, the delegate of G.o.d, and the standard-bearer of the true religion, proclaim himself officially head of the false? No; that was too much for his conscience." But the fatal meshes of prescription, of superst.i.tions ancient and gloomy, gathered around him; he heard that he was no perfect Caesar without this office, and eventually the very same reason which had obliged Augustus not to suppress, but himself to a.s.sume, the tribunitian office, namely, that it was a popular mode of leaving democratic organs untouched, whilst he neutralized their democratic functions by absorbing them into his own, availed to overthrow all Christian scruples of conscience, even in the most Christian of the Caesars, many years _after_ Constantine. The pious Theodosius found himself literally compelled to become a Pagan pontiff. A _bon mot_ [Footnote: "A _bon mot_."--This was built on the accident that a certain _Maximus_ stood in notorious circ.u.mstances of rivals.h.i.+p to the emperor [Theodosius]: and the bitterness of the jest took this turn?

that if the emperor should persist in declining the office of _Pont.

_Maximus_, in that case, "erit Pontifex Maximus;" that is, Maximus (the secret aspirant) shall be our Pontifex. _So_ the words sounded to those in the secret [_synetoisi_], whilst to others they seemed to have no meaning at all.] circulating amongst the people warned him that, if he left the cycle of imperial powers incomplete, if he suffered the galvanic battery to remain imperfect in its circuit of links, pretty soon he would tempt treason to show its head, and would even for the present find but an imperfect obedience. Reluctantly therefore the emperor gave way: and perhaps soothed his fretting conscience, by offering to heaven, as a penitential litany, that same pet.i.tion which Naaman the Syrian offered to the prophet Elijah as a reason for a personal dispensation. Hardly more possible it was that a camel should go through the eye of a needle, than that a Roman senator should forswear those inveterate superst.i.tions with which his own system of aristocracy had been riveted for better and worse. As soon would the Venetian senator, the gloomy "magnifico" of St. Mark, have consented to Renounce the annual wedding of his republic with the Adriatic, as the Roman n.o.ble, whether senator, or senator elect, or of senatorial descent, would have dissevered his own solitary stem from the great forest of his ancestral order; and this he must have done by doubting the legend of Jupiter Stator, or by withdrawing his allegiance from Jupiter Capitolinus. The Roman people universally became agitated towards the opening of the fifth century after Christ, when their own twelfth century was drawing near to its completion. Rome had now reached the very condition of Dr. Faustus--having originally received a known term of prosperity from some dark power; but at length hearing the hours, one after the other, tolling solemnly from the church-tower, as they exhausted the waning minutes of the very final day marked down in the contract. The more profound was the faith of Rome in the flight of the twelve vultures, once so glorious, now so sad, an augury, the deeper was the depression as the last hour drew near that had been so mysteriously prefigured. The reckoning, indeed, of chronology was slightly uncertain. The Varronian account varied from others. But these trivial differences might tell as easily against them as for them, and did but strengthen the universal agitation. Alaric, in the opening of the fifth century [about 4l0]--Attila, near the middle [445]--already seemed prelusive earthquakes running before the final earthquake. And Christianity, during this era of public alarm, was so far from a.s.suming a more winning aspect to Roman eyes, as a religion promising to survive their own, that already, under that character of reversionary triumph, this gracious religion seemed a public insult, and this meek religion a perpetual defiance; pretty much as a king sees with scowling eyes, when revealed to him in some gla.s.s of Cornelius Agrippa, the portraits of that mysterious house which is destined to supplant his own.

Now, from this condition of feeling at Rome, it is apparent not only as a fact that Constantine did not overthrow Paganism, but as a possibility that he could not have overthrown it. In the fierce conflict he would probably have been overthrown himself; and, even for so much as he _did_ accomplish, it was well that he attempted it at a distance from Rome. So profoundly, therefore, are the fathers in error, that instead of that instant victory which they ascribe to Christianity, even Constantine's revolution was merely local. Nearly five centuries, in fact, it cost, and not three, to Christianize even the entire Mediterranean empire of Rome; and the premature effort of Constantine ought to be regarded as a mere _fluctus dec.u.ma.n.u.s_ in the continuous advance of the new religion,--one of those ambitious billows which sometimes run far ahead of their fellows in a tide steadily gaining ground, but which inevitably recede in the next moment, marking only the strength of that tendency which sooner or later is destined to fill the whole capacity of the sh.o.r.e.

To have proved, therefore, if it could have been proved, that Christianity had been fatal in the way of a magical charm to the Oracles of the world, would have proved nothing but a perplexing inconsistency, so long as the fathers were obliged to confess that Paganism itself, as a gross total, as the parent superst.i.tion (sure to reproduce Oracles faster than they could be extinguished), had been suffered to exist for many centuries concurrently with Christianity, and had finally been overthrown by the simple majesty of truth that courts the light, as matched against falsehood that shuns it.

As applied, therefore, to the first problem in the whole question upon Oracles,--_When, and under what circ.u.mstances, did they cease?_-- the _Dissertatio_ of Van Dale, and the _Histoire des Oracles_ by Fontenelle, are irresistible, though not written in a proper spirit of gravity, nor making use of that indispensable argument which we have ourselves derived from the a.n.a.logy of all scriptural precedents.

But the case is far otherwise as concerns the second problem,--_How, and by what machinery, did the Oracles, in the days of their prosperity, conduct their elaborate ministrations?_ To this problem no justice at all is done by the school of Van Dale. A spirit of mockery and banter is ill applied to questions that at any time have been centres of fear, and hope, and mysterious awe, to long trains of human generations. And the coa.r.s.e a.s.sumption of systematic fraud in the Oracles is neither satisfactory to the understanding, as failing to meet many important aspects of the case, nor is it at all countenanced by the kind of evidences that have been hitherto alleged. The fathers had taken the course--vulgar and superst.i.tious--of explaining everything sagacious, everything true, everything that by possibility could seem to argue prophetic functions in the greater Oracles, as the product indeed of inspiration, but of inspiration emanating from an evil spirit. This hypothesis of a diabolic inspiration is rejected by the school of Van Dale. Both the power of at all looking into the future, and the fancied source of that power, are dismissed as contemptible chimeras. Upon the first of these dark pretensions we shall have occasion to speak at another point. Upon the other we agree with Van Dale. Yet, even here, the spirit of triumphant ridicule, applied to questions not wholly within the competence of human resources, is displeasing in grave discussions: grave they are by necessity of their relations, howsoever momentarily disfigured by levity and the unseasonable grimaces of self-sufficient "philosophy."

This temper of mind is already advertised from the first to the observing reader of Van Dale by the character of his engraved frontispiece. Men are there exhibited in the act of juggling, and still more odiously as exulting over their juggleries by gestures of the basest collusion, such as protruding the tongue, inflating one cheek by means of the tongue, grinning, and winking obliquely. These vilenesses are so ign.o.ble, that for his own sake a man of honor (whether as a writer or a reader) shrinks from dealing with any case to which they do really adhere; such a case belongs to the province of police courts, not of literature. But, in the ancient apparatus of the Oracles although frauds and _espionage_ did certainly form an occasional resource, the artifices employed were rarely illiberal in their mode, and always enn.o.bled by their motive. As to the mode, the Oracles had fortunately no temptation to descend into any tricks that could look like "thimble-rigging;" and as to the motive, it will be seen that this could never be dissociated from some regard to public or patriotic objects in the first place; to which if any secondary interest were occasionally attached, this could rarely descend so low as even to an ordinary purpose of gossiping curiosity, but never to a base, mercenary purpose of fraud. Our views, however, on this phasis of the question, will speedily speak for themselves.

Meantime, pausing for one moment to glance at the hypothesis of the fathers, we confess ourselves to be scandalized by its unnecessary plunge into the ign.o.ble. Many sincere Christian believers have doubted altogether of any evil spirits, as existences, warranted by Scripture, that is, as beings whose principle was evil ["evil, be thou my good:"

P. L.]; others, again, believing in the possibility that spiritual beings had been (in ways unintelligible to us) seduced from their state of perfection by temptations a.n.a.logous to those which had seduced man, acquiesced in the notion of spirits tainted with evil, but not therefore (any more than man himself) essentially or causelessly malignant. Now, it is well known, and, amongst others, Eichhorn _(Einletung in das alte Testament) has noticed the fact, which will be obvious, on a little reflection, to any even unlearned student of the Scriptures who can throw his memory back through a real familiarity with those records, that the Jews derived their obstinate notions of fiends and demoniacal possessions (as accounting even for bodily affections) entirely from their Chaldean captivity. Not before that great event in Jewish history, and, therefore, in consequence of that event, were the Jews inoculated with this Babylonian, Persian, and Median superst.i.tion. Now, if Eichhorn and others are right, it follows that the elder Scriptures, as they ascend more and more into the purer atmosphere of untainted Hebrew creeds, ought to exhibit an increasing freedom from all these modes of demoniacal agency. And accordingly so we find it. Messengers of G.o.d are often concerned in the early records of Moses; but it is not until we come down to Post-Mosaical records, Job, for example (though that book is doubtful as to its chronology), and the chronicles of the Jewish kings (_Judaic or Israelitish)_, that we first find any allusion to malignant spirits. As against Eichhorn, however, though readily conceding that the agency is not often recognized, we would beg leave to notice, that there is a three- fold agency of evil, relatively to man, ascribed to certain spirits in the elder Scriptures, namely: 1, of _misleading_ (as in the case of the Israelitish king seduced into a fatal battle by a falsehood originating with a spiritual being); 2, of _temptation_; 3, of calumnious _accusation_ directed against absent parties. It is not absolutely an untenable hypothesis, that these functions of malignity to man, as at first sight they appear, may be in fact reconcilable with the general functions of a being not malignant, and not evil in any sense, but simply obedient to superior commands: for none of us supposes, of course, that a "destroying angel" must be an evil spirit, though sometimes appearing in a dreadful relation of hostility to _all_ parties (as in the case of David's punishment). But, waiving all these speculations, one thing is apparent, that the negative allowance, the toleration granted to these later Jewish modes of belief by our Saviour, can no more be urged as arguing any positive sanction to such existences (to _demons_ in the bad sense), than his toleration of Jewish errors and conceits in questions of science. Once for all, it was no purpose of his mission to expose errors in matters of pure curiosity, and in speculations _not_ moral, but exclusively intellectual. And, besides the ordinary argument for rejecting such topics of teaching, as not necessarily belonging to any known purpose of the Christian revelation (which argument is merely negative, and still leaves it open to have regarded such communications as a possible _extra_ condescension, as a _lucro ponatur_, not absolutely to have been expected, but if granted as all the more meritorious in Christianity), we privately are aware of an argument, far more rigorous and coercive, which will place this question upon quite another basis. This argument, which, in a proper situation, and with ampler disposable s.p.a.ce, we shall expose in its strength, will show that it was not that neutral possibility which men have supposed, for the founder of our faith to have granted light, casually or indirectly, upon questions of curiosity. One sole revelation was made by Him, as to the nature of the intercourse and the relations in another world; but _that_ was for the purpose of forestalling a vile, unspiritual notion, already current amongst the childish Jews, and sure to propagate itself even to our own days, unless an utter _averruncatio_ were applied to it. This was its purpose, and not any purpose of gratification to unhallowed curiosity; we speak of the question about the reversionary rights of marriage in a future state.

This memorable case, by the way, sufficiently exposes the gross, infantine sensualism of the Jewish mind at that period, and throws an indirect light on their creed as to demons. With this one exception, standing by itself and self-explained, there never was a gleam of revelation granted by any authorized prophet to speculative curiosity, whether pointing to science, or to the mysteries of the spiritual world. And the true argument on this subject would show that this abstinence was not accidental; was not merely on a motive of convenience, as evading any needless extension of labors in teaching, which is the furthest point attained by any existing argument; but, on the contrary, that there was an obligation of consistency, stern, absolute, insurmountable, which made it _essential_ to withhold such revelations; and that had but one such condescension, even to a harmless curiosity, been conceded, there would have arisen instantly a rent--a fracture--a schism--in another vast and collateral purpose of Providence.

From all considerations of the Jewish condition at the era of Christianity, the fathers might have seen the license for doubt as to the notions of a diabolic inspiration. Why must the prompting spirits, if really a.s.sumed to be the efficient agency behind the Oracles, be figured as holding any relation at all to moral good or moral evil? Why not allow of demoniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power, prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes of man's moral nature? Or, if revolting angels were a.s.sumed, why degrade their agency in so vulgar and unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation to man which can be imputed to a demon--his function of secret _calumnious accusation_; from which idea, lowering the Miltonic "archangel ruined" into the a.s.sessor of thieves, as a private slanderer (_diabolos_), proceeds, through the intermediate Italian _diavolo_, our own grotesque vulgarism of the _devil_; [Footnote: But, says an unlearned man, Christ uses the word _devil_. Not so. The word used is _diabolos_. Translate v. g. "The accuser and his angels."] an idea which must ever be injurious, in common with all base conceptions, to a grand and spiritual religion. If the Oracles _were_ supported by mysterious agencies of spiritual beings, it was still open to have distinguished between mere modes of power or of intelligence, and modes of illimitable evil. The _results_ of the Oracles were beneficent: that was all which the fathers had any right to know: and their unwarranted introduction of wicked or rebel angels was as much a surrept.i.tious fraud upon their audiences, as their neglect to distinguish between the conditions of an extinct superst.i.tion and a superst.i.tion dormant or decaying.

To leave the fathers, and to state our own views on the final question argued by Van Dale--"What was the essential machinery by which the Oracles moved?"--we shall inquire,

1. What was the relation of the Oracles (and we would wish to be understood as speaking particularly of the Delphic Oracle) to the credulity of Greece?

2. What was the relation of that same Oracle to the absolute truth?

3. What was its relation to the public welfare of Greece?

Into this trisection we shall decompose the coa.r.s.e unity of the question presented by Van Dale and his Vandals, as though the one sole "issue," that could be sent down for trial before a jury, were the likelihoods of fraud and gross swindling. It is not with the deceptions or collusions of the Oracles, as mere matters of fact, that we in this age are primarily concerned, but with those deceptions as they affected the contemporary people of Greece. It is important to know whether the general faith of Greece in the mysterious pretensions of Oracles were unsettled or disturbed by the several agencies at work that naturally tended to rouse suspicion; such, for instance, as these four which follow:--1. Eminent instances of scepticism with regard to the oracular powers, from time to time circulating through Greece in the shape of _bon mots_; or, 2, which silently amounted to the same virtual expression of distrust, Refusals (often more speciously wearing the name of _neglects_) to consult t