gencies, from time to time confirmed and maintained their faith in the sacred institutions, notwithstanding their palpable imperfections, and many suspicious features. At the same time they preserved the living flame of religion, that so beautifully characterises the early historians of Greece, whose faith in Divine Providence at the helm of

mundane government so thoroughly pervades every record that they make, that Herodotus and Thucydides may indeed be regarded as sacred historians; whilst our modern Christian Recorders of Events, falsely denominated classical writers, are well entitled to the name that they have chosen to distinguish them in the lists of authors, where they can never be recognised in any other capacity than that of profane historians. Such historians never mention the name of God, or refer the course of events to His providence, but regard Him only as a sleeping God, in the bosom of a universe that goes by machinery, maintained in motion by dead impulse. The self-evident faith of the ancients in the oracles and providence of the gods, sufficiently justifies the legislators, who professed to be guided by Divine inspiration and perhaps the wisest man is he who acknowledges the fact; for inspiration is an agency graduated infinitely with greater and less degrees of imperfection, and never was, is, or can be what the vulgar esteem it. The poets are nearer the truth, in their estimate of the Divine Afflatus.

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SCENE THIRD.

SCULPTORS, PAINTERS, ARCHITECTS, ETC.

We have already seen that the Jew was forbidden, by the stringent provisions of his moral and ceremonial law, to exercise his skill in the arts of sculptural and pictorial design. Such restrictions the neighbouring nations did not experience. They were free, and their freedom developed itself in the most simple and natural manner. The first, and perhaps the most impressive, of all idolatrous worship is that of the fetich, which is merely a simple, natural object; it may be a stone, a tree, or a mountain, or an animal like the Divine Serpent or the Divine Calf, or a work of art, in which there is little skill displayed, such as the images of Doorga, made of straw, sticks, and clay, or a relic like those of the Roman Church, or a piece of bread, which, by act of consecration, is made a god, and worshipped accordingly with devout reverence. The principle of this worship is involved in every species of consecration; and it is the spirit of this primitive and simple religion that still solemnises the mind of the Christian, who partakes of the Eucharist, in which the doctrine of Transubstantiation is merely graduated through all the sects of Christendom, differing only from each other like notes in music, in the

name and the interval. It is the same spirit that prefers the churchyard, or the church itself, to the open field as a place of final rest; that makes devout pilgrimage to Holy Places, and takes off the hat in reverence as it enters the precinct of a building devoted to public worship. It is akin to the old and the natural worship of the Deus Loci, or god of the place or object. Such ideas appear to be everlasting, and can only disappear in one or other of two ultimates-the faith of an Omnipresent Spirit, who is no respecter of persons, places, or objects, or in the absence of all religious faith whatsoever. They are of immemorial antiquity, and the analogue of the Roman Mass is to be found in every religion under heaven. The artistic addition of a shape to these objects of worship was made progressively and gradually, like the act of Divine creation itself, beginning at the lowest, and rising up to the highest at last. The first attempts at statuary were Hermæ, or blocks or stones, with heads alone, without legs or arms, like the idol Juggernaut. Afterwards arms or wings, or the bodies of different animals, were added, and symbolical images came into being. To give a god the entire shape of the human form was considered for many ages irreverent. The Oriental nations still preserve this peculiar idea of a characteristic distinction between God and man, and prefer the monstrous to the human form in all their symbolical representatives

of Deity. Monstrosity is power. Even the Roman Catholic populace are not exceptions to this prejudice in favour of some personal deformity in a sacred image; for it rarely, if ever, happens that a miraculous picture or statue possesses any value as a work of art, but is ever expressive of that infancy of humanity which is unable to represent the superhuman by other than the distorted or the monstrous. The Greeks were the first amongst the Gentile nations who dared to represent the gods in a human shape the first who created the god-man in ideal art; but it was long before even this improvement was permitted in the temples, where the prejudices of Priests and People regarded it as a profanation. It is reported of the Egyptians, that when persuaded by the Greeks to adopt the new system of making gods with their legs apart, they became alarmed at the innovation, and put them in chains, lest they should walk away. A long and a weary struggle was maintained between the fetich and symbolical conservatives on the one hand, and the humanists on the other; and it was merely because the Greeks had not a law like the Jews to forbid the representation of the gods in a human form, that the humanists at last succeeded in achieving a triumph. Even then the antiquated system in part preserved its existence, and to the last the fetich and the symbol continued to compete with the divine humanity for the patronage of the people. Nor does it appear that the human forms of the

gods were ever regarded as equal in sanctity or mythological grandeur to their monstrous predecessors: they were too like the human to serve as types or symbols of the superhuman. "The old statues" (said Eschylus the poet, himself a disciple even of the monstrous), "with all their simplicity, are considered divine; whilst the new, with all the care bestowed on their execution, are indeed admired, but bear much less of the impression of divinity." Even the old wooden images that had gone to decay were not replaced by the beautiful creations of an almost perfect art, but by exact fac similes of the antique monstrosity whose very deformities were sacred in the estimation of the devout, and ridiculed only by the irreligious and profane, the philosophical and the skeptical.

It is apparent, therefore, from the history of sacred art amongst the Greeks, that in proportion as they perfected this artistic idea of divine humanity, they lost their regard for their national faith. Art was coming out of superstition, like the plumule from the radix. It was the puberty of Paganism, at which it was prepared to take its flight into higher intellectual and passional regions. Reason and genius discovered the imposition that human imagination had practised upon ignorant and bewildered simplicity. The monsters were ridiculed by the learned and the intelligent, and the perfect models of men and women were merely criticised as specimens of art by the connoisseurs,