being the smallest in number and least influential, and also least accomplished, their language and civilisation attracted no attention, and were regarded merely as a species of barbarism. The Bible, however, was translated into Greek soon after the Macedonian Conquest, and at the same time their own Rabbinical philosophy began to borrow the logic of the Greeks; and from this time the Mishna, or the Second Law, the Law of Human Interpretation, was superadded to their Divine Law, and these two became the Divine Humanity of the law, which to this day rules over the dispersed of Judah.

Jews and Greeks are the parents of civilisation. We see them now mixed. They have both also gone down into Egypt once more. Alexandria is full of them, and the Schools of Athens and the Synagogues of Jerusalem are both transplanted there. Both are prepared to start afresh from the primitive source of civilisation. For what reason they are there collected they know not, and perhaps conjecture not each man follows his own individual vocation. But a singular series of political events and military movements has brought them there, and there each pursues his own peculiar destiny, holds his own faith, and solves his own problems, after the fashion of his country. It is the same in Syria. There are Ghettos everywhere-urban districts where Jews congregate, and live apart, eat apart and think apart from Greeks, but meet them in the

shops and the markets, and buy and sell, and talk of wars and rumours of wars, and, it may be, sometimes of philosophy and the arts.

The intercourse began 300 years before Christ, and continued with little interruption even after the Roman Conquest. This only brought the third great mission to the same primordial region, that all three might there commence the great struggle, or the combination of the threefold cord that cannot be broken. That curious process we shall see in due time. Meanwhile there is nothing particular to specify in the subsequent mission of Greece, after the conquest of the East and the South; for there it merely planted its own civilisation, and cultivated its own philosophy and arts; declining however from the brilliance and the purity of the ancient models in the more extensive arena of political and commercial activity, intrigue and luxury, and thus exposing itself to inevitable defeat by a less luxurious race fresh from the simpler and more barbarous regions of the North and the West. But whilst each conquers, each is also conquered. mission can ever be annihilated. The Divine Decree is for ever. Each is invested with its own weapon, and with its own weapon it prevails, and beats its conqueror, who conquers in return with another instrument. Victories and defeats therefore are cominon to all. Fear not. Steel will not conquer spirit, and spirit, until purified, will not consteel. Philosophy will puzzle faith till faith be

quer

No

pure, and faith will withstand and repress philosophy till philosophy be wise. When the struggle begins we shall see the effects of antagonism and union; but that requires a great primordial fact to commence it. Until the Christian Epoch, these two or three commissioners only jostle one another in the streets, and look upon each other as irreconcileable opposites. A great event will bring all these three missions together, and twist or rather entangle them like a cord, to the astonishment of recusants, as well as their own.

GENERAL REVIEW.

In Poetry and Prose, in Philosophy, in Logic and Rhetoric, in Physics and Metaphysics-in all that is embraced in the idea of intellectual cultivation— the Greeks take the lead of all other nations. They first gave a method and a consecutive character to logical compositions, systematic form and beauty of design to poetry. They first broke down the wall of partition that divides the physical from the metaphysical world; invaded the mystic regions of spirit and essence; analysed their forms and combinations, and revealed their elements. The spiritual world was discovered by the Greeks. The Jews, with a spiritual God, never were a spiritual people. They saw visions and heard voices,

but they did not penetrate, with their metaphysical being, the spirit land from which those visions and voices were commissioned. In the richest descriptions of a future state of Redemption, their prophets never transcended the terrestrial and the sensual. The future heaven of the Jews was earth, and earth only, with plenty of corn to eat and wine to drink. "Ye shall grow up as calves in the stall," said the prophets to that people; "Ye shall build houses and inhabit them, plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them;" but a spirit world was never described, for it was never entered; and the sensuous understanding alone was addressed. It was far otherwise with the spiritual Greeks; for with material gods they became a spiritual people, who visited that world within the mind which none but the highest order of men can reach, and who alone, of all the nations of the world, invented a language wherewith to express metaphysical ideas. Little does the world know how much it is indebted to that one people for the richness of meaning in the words which it uses. The spirit of Greece is incorporated for ever with the tongue of every civilised nation. civilised nation. We have ever borrowed, and still continue to borrow, from its inexhaustible resources. Almost all the technical language of science is Greek; and such common words as Theology, Philosophy, Geography, Geology, and a thousand such, are merely compounded of Greek words, or adopted from Greek into Western

tongues. It was only by the Greek language that the primitive doctrines of the Christian Church were logically expressed and worked into their present ecclesiastical form. There was no other language in the world at the time sufficiently furnished with metaphysical resources to admit of a spiritual controversy. Cicero the orator has remarked, in his book of the "Nature of the Gods," that several Romans, deeply conversant with Greek learning, were unable to communicate a knowledge of it to their countrymen, because they considered it impossible to express in Latin what they had learned in Greek; so little adapted was the Latin language, even in the time of Julius Caesar, for conducting a spiritual or metaphysical discussion: and in after years, when this deficiency was supplied by the Latin Philosophers and the Fathers of the Latin Church, it was only by the copious introduction of Greek words into Latin. So true it is that when God gives a mission to any one people, it is found impossible for any other people to supersede the first in any other way than by borrowing the gift in which the mission is included. In the gift of the Greek tongue a spiritual mission was conveyed. That tongue was cultivated by a spiritual people; and Providence, in due time, employed it alone in elaborating the doctrines of a spiritual church in the infancy of its being.

No nation ever became great without passing through the ordeal of a metaphysical controversy,