of Greece, Persia. I need but remind the reader of the wellknown story; how Alexander, after annihilating Thebes (the only Greek city which had ventured to rebel against the Macedonians) led his army (moderate in size but perfectly disciplined) into the heart of Asia; how he overthrew the Persian army and everywhere replaced Persian rule by Greek rule; how under his overwhelming onset the famous religion which called itself by the name of Zoroaster vanished into corners and was lost for a time to the sight of men; how he implanted Greek settlers all over western Asia and Egypt, and made Greek language and learning dominant over those vast tracts; how, having effected a work which in its external aspect was one of the greatest that any man ever did, he died at the early age of thirty-two, of a fever, at Babylon. The one Greek achievement which Alexander was unable to renew, create, or transplant into any single spot of his vast empire, was the Greek political liberty. This the Greeks had lost; deservedly we must own; and few of the warlike despots who followed Alexander as his successors have any claim to our attention as part of the divine legacy of Greece to mankind.

But the spiritual force which mankind owe to Greece was openly active among mankind for many centuries after Alexander; and though lost to view in that strange twilight of thought which we call the medieval period, has been revived in modern times, and influences us still. To this then I must now recur. But the theme is so great as to deserve a chapter to itself, and the present chapter, which has given as it were the framework of the subject, may well terminate here.

CHAPTER VII

ANCIENT RELIGION: THE HELLENIC QUEST AFTER TRUTH

IT is of the religion of Greece, as it emerged out of mere naïve mythology into its final development, that this chapter must treat; and I will begin by speaking of the Delphic oracle. How far that oracle, the most marked centre of Greek religion, was animated by true sentiment and real uplifting of the heart from man to God, is hardly possible for us now to tell. That it had its delusive side, in which it made use of verbal quibbles, we know; that it had its worldly-wise side, and its secret sources of information, is probable; and when Greece was invaded by sceptical philosophy, about the middle of the fifth century before Christ, the oracle began slowly to lose its commanding reputation. Yet out of the midst of that very scepticism a hand was reached out, which did to a certain extent preserve the honour of the oracle.

The event of which I am about to speak happened, as we cannot doubt, before the Peloponnesian war began; and it may justly be said that the Delphic oracle, before it fell, bequeathed its authority to a new order of things, and pointed the way to a type of character, and to a method of religious inquiry, which could not possibly have belonged to any formal priesthood. The way in which this came about was through its utterance as regards Socrates. Of that utterance there are two versions, slightly differing; let me quote both. First let me give the version as Plato reports it, in the account which he gives of the apology or public defence of Socrates, when tried before the Athenian people; it runs thus:

You must have known Chærephon; he was early a friend of mine, and also a friend of yours, for he shared in the exile of the people, and returned with you. Well, Chærephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all his doings; and he went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether (as I was saying, I must beg you not to interrupt)-he asked the oracle to tell him whether there was any one wiser than I was,

and the Pythian prophetess answered, that there was no man wiser. Chærephon is dead himself; but his brother, who is in court, will confirm the truth of this story. Jowett's Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1. p. 335.

The other version occurs in the apology of Socrates as reported by Xenophon:

Cherephon once, in the presence of many witnesses, put a question at Delphi concerning me, and Apollo answered that there was no human being more liberal, or more upright, or more temperate than myself. The Works of Xenophon, by H. G. Dakyns, vol. III. part I. p. 189.

The Platonic version is no doubt the correct one here; but the question arises, how came the Delphic oracle to know anything at all about Socrates? The answer is, that the age was one in which sceptical opinions were growing; and sceptical though Socrates himself was, he yet welcomed and did not abandon religion, as it was practically held in his own country, including the reverence for Delphi. In a self-confident age a wise man had been found who was not self-confident, but who trusted in the Gods; and the fact was sufficiently remarkable to have attracted attention, even at Delphi. If this account of the matter be true, it must raise our opinion of the Delphic oracle; we shall perceive in it a seriousness of intention; but after all it is Socrates who must attract our highest interest, and it is his position as a man and as a teacher that I must now proceed to examine. But, first, to speak of his predecessors.

Except the dimly seen figure of Pythagoras, there is not among the Greeks before Socrates any nameable person, whose influence can possibly be held to have had its strong animating centre in religion; and even of Pythagoras little can be said in this connexion. The Greeks were religious, but religion entered into their lives as one of many various and complex influences; and hence we must not be surprised if, in the days before rationalism began to affect the Greek mind, the poets are they who give us the most striking examples of religious seriousness. By Eschylus and Sophocles the heathen mythology is used in such a way that pure religion shines through it; the mythology is assumed without questioning, but the morality of those two poets, which is in many respects very profound, is not dependent on the mythology; a mysterious goodness is ascribed to the supreme Powers which rule all things. Thus the Chorus in the Agamemnon of Eschylus, after briefly referring to Uranus and Cronus, who were said to have preceded Zeus as rulers of the immortals, proceed

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to speak of Zeus in terms which seem to imply that he is the true and only author of divine judgments:

"He who in triumphal tones calls on Zeus"-thus their song runs"shall obtain perfect wisdom; Zeus, who guides men in the way of knowledge, who has laid down the inviolable law that through suffering comes experience."

That is a monotheistic passage written by a poet who was apparently a polytheist; and the numerous passages in Eschylus which speak of the just retribution of woe to the sinner, are all based on a belief in mysterious divine powers which either are unnamed or which centre in Zeus. It is true that in the Prometheus Bound, and in the three plays which collectively are called the Oresteia, Eschylus does set great store by the mythology; but in each case it is with the intention of showing that peace and harmony are the ultimate purpose of the divine will, and that Zeus is conducting all things to this end. We see that this is the case in the Oresteia, and though the play is lost which would have brought the Prometheus Bound to its full end, we know that in that case also a harmonious result was attained under the will of Zeus.

The mythology is as much accepted by Sophocles as by Eschylus, though not as much dwelt upon; but even more than Eschylus does Sophocles use phrases which in their simple religious trust recall the Bible. "Take courage, my child, take courage, say the Chorus to the despairing Electra; "Zeus is still mighty in heaven, he who beholds and governs all things; to whom submit the anger that torments thee; be not overmuch afflicted by thy foes, and yet forget them not." In a similar tone Antigone, after burying her brother contrary to the prohibition of Creon, speaks to the tyrant:

It entered not my mind that thy proclamations were of such power, that thou a mortal shouldest override the unwritten and unshakable laws of the Gods; those laws are not of to-day or yesterday, but are eternal, and no man knows whence they came into being.

So too the Chorus in the Edipus Tyrannus pray for "a pious purity of word and deed, according to the lofty laws of which heaven is the sole father: great is God in these and groweth not old." Great too was the indignation of Sophocles against blasphemers of the Gods; as appears in the sequel of the chorus just quoted, and also in the Ajax. A gentle yet strong spirit was he; the Athenians once made him, in reward for his poetry, an admiral; but they had the good sense to give him Pericles as

a colleague in actual service. However, he would no doubt have fought bravely, as Eschylus did at Marathon.

Those who, after reading the tragedies of Eschylus and Sophocles, proceed to read those three solemn and affecting Platonic works, which narrate the trial, imprisonment, and death of Socrates, namely the Apology, Crito, and Phado, will not feel that they have changed their atmosphere at all, as far as religious belief and hope goes; they are indeed beholding religious belief exemplified in a real man, and not in the shadowy personages of ancient legend; but the kind of belief is the same. The religion in its details is mistaken, and Socrates at any rate knew that it was mistaken; but the spirit of the belief is one of trust in the Gods, and trust that the Gods are ruling human affairs in such wise that a happy and harmonious end will be realised.

Now the philosophers of Greece who precede Socrates are by no means centred in this sort of attitude. Heraclitus indeed is imbued with the conviction that the Divine nature is intrinsically rational; and Xenophanes protests against the anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity prevalent among his contemporaries. In the refined abstractions of Parmenides we discern a conviction of the unity of the world, and that in this unity goodness consists. But all these modes of thinking, though connected with religion, are not the heart of religion; the feeling of trust is not dominant. Still less is it dominant in Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Empedocles, Democritus, or Anaxagoras. On the whole, these writers are physicists; though in their physical speculations the proportion of observation to theory is much smaller than in the physicists of the present day. They have a regard for religion, and for religion in a sense different from the popular mythology, but religion is not their central thought. Of Pythagoras I spoke above; a great genius he seems to have been; but his exact attitude towards religion has not been clearly told us.

Every reader of Eschylus and Sophocles, and it may be added of Pindar also, will be sensible that religion stood for a much greater force, a much more overpowering topic of thought, to those poets than it did to the philosophers of the sixth century or the early fifth century before Christ. But with the splendour of Athens under Pericles there arose a light and sceptical vein of thought, pervading the Athenian mind (not without examples in other parts of Greece also). Euripides, the third great dramatist of Athens, has drawn in the breath of scepticism; he has the