the name of reason, in the name of the universe that never deceives us, but is sound and sane in every atom, I affirm that the primal instinct of self-preservation, when it utters its mysterious command,-"Die to live,"— does not mean annihilation.

"The ship may sink,

And I may drink

A hasty death in the bitter sea;

But all that I leave

In the ocean grave

Can be slipped and spared, and no loss to me."

Evolution has produced and can produce nothing higher and grander than a being who, like the God of evolution, can think and love and will, and, conscious of his own being, say, like the Eternal himself, "I am." It remains for evolution to now accomplish in the vast ranges of spirit life the mortal and spiritual perfection of this being it has called into existence. The instinct of selfpreservation, and the same instinct grown to be a moral command to our spirit that we die to live,-these two together, therefore, form two points in the curve of our being as it sweeps resistlessly through death into the infinite beyond of God. Can we now describe a third point in this vast moral and spiritual curve? If so, then we can quickly tell whether time or eternity, whether a selfish prudence or a growing likeness forever to the infinite reason, goodness, and love, is the true measure of our destiny. When the instinct of self-preservation whispers to the heart or conscience its mysterious command, "Die to live," it always does this in the name of certain great and infinite ideals. If it bids us, for instance, sacrifice our love of self-indulgence to Christ-like self-denial, it is because the Christ ideal of life inspires and commands us. What a capacity we have for love and self-sacrifice, what heroism and devotion we feel ourselves capable of! but how infinitely far below our divine ideals are the lives we live! Why, such capability of loving have we that even in death many an earnest Christian soul might give utterance to its holiest aspiration in the words of the great Hebrew psalmist: "My heart crieth out to God, to the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?"

The ideal of justice, too! Is there one who does not know in his heart of hearts

that the awful wrong and evil we have done ourselves and others cannot be atoned for in this short life, but that we must work out their sure penalty in ourselves forever? The aspirations of the intellect, also! The most intellectual man who ever lived is just preparing to know something when he dies. Now these ideals of love, duty, justice, and culture, what do they mean to us? Die to live is the eternal law of our spirits. These great commanding ideals, that bid us as spiritual beings look beyond death and find their fulfilment in the eternal life with God, as God liveth, are they not the voice of the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed, his voice sounding in our souls? and has this Infinite Energy in plant, animal, and man ever been known to lie? Have not all its prophecies been always and forever fulfilled? From the first cell of living matter down through a hundred million years' climb of life, has one of these prophecies of change and growth into higher forms ever been known to fail? There is an insect known as the Luna Sphynx, that, having first entered the pith of the poplar, before it becomes a chrysalis turns its head square around, facing its place of exit, else it never could become a moth, and escape into the outer air. Now, I ask, what is this wonderful instinct of this insect that has been so fitly compared to the desire of immortality but a manifestation of the same infinite energy that inspires our ideals of truth and love and justice and duty, causing us to look beyond death for their fulfilment? But is it alleged that the gulf of death is so broad. and deep that the Infinite Spirit of life is powerless to cross it, and so make real forever its own divine ideals of eternal life? I answer, Wide as is that seeming gulf, it can be no wider or deeper than is the gulf that separates between inorganic matter and living forms; and yet the infinite power of ascending life bridged that gulf as if it were a very little thing.

The universe is not bankrupt. The liv ing God in it is not dead. All his promises will be fulfilled. Here, then, are the three points in the curve of our being which together determine the sweep of our destiny: (1) the instinct of self-preservation that we share with all living things; (2) that instinct become a law to command our moral allegi

ance when it whispers its mandate, "Die to live"; and, finally, at still another point in the scale of our being, (3) the divine ideals which are the deathless fulfilment of this same eternal law, "Die to live." Now what does the measurement of these points establish? Does it not clearly show, even to a moral certainty, that the curve of man's personal being sweeps around death, and joins man forever in thought and purpose to the infinite and eternal of God?

THE LIMITS OF ANCIENT THOUGHT.

BY CHARLES MORRIS.

Classical scholars have been so long in the habit of contrasting our modern with the Grecian literary culture in a tone of quiet and self-satisfied disparagement that it needs a certain degree of hardihood to take an opposite view, and to claim that we are in advance of the ancient world literature as in mechanics. And yet, despite the justness of the Grecian claim to high artistic finish in their intellectual productions, it may not be impossible to show that, even in this respect, the world has advanced instead of retrograding, and that the loftiest merit of artistic labors does not necessarily consist in perfection of form.

It is, indeed, difficult to imagine that the world has made no mental progress during twenty-five centuries of active civilization, and that a race but just emerged from the depths of prehistoric gloom could, at a bound, reach a height which the accumulated mental labors of so long a civilized period have failed to surpass. Our claim to vast progress in science and mechanics is indisputable; but it is strongly asserted that we have gained nothing in intellectual acumen, and even stand at a lower level than that attained by a people still hovering on the farthest horizon of civilization.

I would not take exception to the prevailing views upon this subject but that there are certain features of the case which do not seem to have been fully considered, and which give us some reason for questioning the assumed supremacy of Grecian art and literature. We have no occasion to deny the full merit of the Hellenic productions.

But we may, at the same time, point out certain limitations to this merit, and show that there existed a boundary wall at which the intellectual culture of Greece stopped short, but over which the modern world has passed, and entered new fields of thought beyond.

Human culture may, with some show of reason, be divided into three distinct sections, the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual. But the culture of the mind is properly embraced in these last two phases, the strictly intellectual section of which is confined to the far past, while in modern culture are intimately combined the intellectual and the spiritual fields of thought. The eye of the intellectual mind is chiefly fixed upon the outer world. It keenly observes and closely discriminates the facts and forms which surround it. Imagination unfolds into activity. Idealization is energetic. But these faculties act upon objects of sense rather than objects of thought. The beauties and harmonies of form, the artistic combinations of lines and colors, the melody of tones and delicate shading of expression, are the subjects to which the mental activity is devoted. There is, undoubtedly, a higher appreciation of the beauties of artistic combination than can be possessed by those who pay a divided mental allegiance to these subjects. For the eye of the modern mind seeks to penetrate below the surface of things. It perceives forces and principles which are not elements of exterior form. It sees the spiritual significance which animates the physical frame of the world without, and which lies inherent in the thoughts within; and, in seeking to express this inner meaning of things, it cannot, at the same time, give that close attention to the delicate perfections of form which constitutes the chief merit of Grecian art.

Any close observation of the mental conceptions of the Hellenic world will show that they are directly based upon visible nature, and never reach from the mundane into the supramundane world. Its philosophy is physical, seldom metaphysical; its poetry dwells upon the charms of the visible; and its cosmogony is but life upon the earth idealized. This is the phase of mentality into which the world slowly grew

be through the silent influence of this fact that sculpture flourished most abundantly in the ancient world, while painting is the favorite form of modern art. Grecian statuary yields us the richest development of the idea of physical beauty. The fathers of art chiselled again and again in marble the perfection of the human frame. They sought not to express the soul, but the body. Their standard of perfection was that of the gymnasium. Their statues never tell stories.

Their facial expression is generic, not specific. They reproduce only such feelings as physical suffering, triumph, modesty, fear, and the like. In fact, it is difficult to do more in marble; yet modern sculptors have succeeded in adding some ideal sense to the perfect exterior of ancient work. Compare, for instance, the Venus de Medici with the Greek Slave. In the one, we have simply a modest shrinking from observation in the other, the pained endurance of a proud soul. In the one the beauty of the form is the whole. In the other the beauty of form is subordinate to the expression of the face.

In the art of painting we possess none of the celebrated ancient examples. Yet, to judge from the extant criticisms upon these works of art, we may fairly conclude that they excelled in their appeal to the senses and in their exact representation of nature, and told nothing of the conflicts and conquests of the soul. The modern painter, on the contrary, has developed not only the perspective of nature, but the perspective of the mind. Greek art is admirable in foreground. Modern art excels in what we may call ideal perspective: it looks from the body, on which rested the eyes of the ancient artist, far into that kingdom of the soul which stretches so illimitably away beyond the boundaries of physical nature.

The dividing line between this phase of ancient and modern art may, in fact, be very closely traced. In Michel Angelo we have the last of the great ancient artists, in Raffaelle the first of the great modern. The one paints bodies, the other souls. The words of Hazlitt in relation to these two artists expresses, indeed, in the most concise terms, the true distinction between ancient and modern art: "The forms of Michel Angelo are objects to admire in themselves: those of Raffaelle are merely

a language pointing to something beyond, and full of this ultimate import."

The distinction here drawn applies to other fields than that of art. Let us take the institution of chivalry, for example. Could there be anything more alien to the ancient character? Can we even imagine the world of Greece and Rome yielding to the spiritual frenzy of the Crusades? It was animal passion or ambition that animated the past. All its enterprises had a strictly logical object. Its wars originated in selfishness or anger. Its migrations were commercial or colonizing. Even its ideal war, the siege of Troy, was strictly personal in its aims and end. Nowhere in ancient enterprises can we trace the sentiment of the impersonal.

During the Middle Ages, on the contrary, the world became stricken with a frenzy of the soul. Europe surged toward Palestine. Why she knew not, except that the ground made sacred by the divine presence was desecrated by infidel feet. It was no longer earthly conquest or animal passion that urged men on to death or ruin. They fought upon earth for the conquest of heaven, and sought to extend the borders of the kingdom of life out into a region illimitable and unknown to the nature-worshipping past.

Strongly similar to this in spirit was the great Mohammedan movement, the overflow of half the civilized world by a torrent of fanaticism pouring from the desert of Arabia, the first proselyting aggression known in history.

We may even carry this comparison into the religious persecutions displayed in the successive periods. They occurred sparingly in Greece, largely in Rome and in later Europe; similar in cruelty, widely dif ferent in purpose. In Greece the object was to avenge insults to the gods. In Rome it was to avert danger to the State. In modern persecutions the impersonal sentiment again appears. Men are straying from the heaven offered them. They must be forced back. Cruelty, torture, death, are mild ends in view of the object to be gained. It is not the gods, not the State, that is to be considered, but man himself. He is refusing the good offered him. He must be forced to accept it.

So the sense of human brotherhood is of modern birth. To the ancient Greeks and

their contemporaries the world outside their national limits was peopled by barbarians, in dealing with whom faith and justice were uncalled-for virtues. Even the little rocky peninsula of Greece was divided between a number of hostile tribes. Fraternity, with this enlightened race, meant simply allegiance to the tribe. The cosmopolitan philanthropy of our days would have seemed simply madness to the mind of an ancient Greek. The tribes had sufficient fellow-feeling to combine against foreign aggression; but they tore one another to pieces like snarling dogs, when left to fight out their own selfish feuds.

So far as any evidence from literature is concerned, the love sentiment in the past was markedly distinct from what it is in the present. We find no evidence of the deep feeling, the intense sentiment, that characterizes modern affection. Take the love of man for woman out of modern imaginative literature, and there would be no literature left. Take the same sentiment out of Greek poetry, and its bulk would scarcely be diminished. The famous lovesong of Sappho is love in its most sensuous phase. The lament of Moschus for Bion is love of man for man. We find nowhere an impassioned declaration of love of man for woman. In the whole range of Greek tragedy we find but one strongly declared lover, the character of Haemon in the Antigone of Sophocles. Yet how is he treated? He pleads passionately with his father for the life of Antigone, but not on the plea that he loves her, and cannot endure, for his love's sake, to have her die. On the contrary, he hardly names his affection, and appeals only to justice and public opinion. It was what we should call a good opportunity wasted. Would Shakspere have handled such a subject in such a frigid vein? The Greeks seem to have utterly lacked the fervent modern idea of love, if we may judge from their literature.

If we consider Greek literature in its other aspects, the same marked difference in character from modern literature may be observed. Let us consider the poetry of the two ages, that form of literature in which the imaginative and mind-impelling sentiment of a race chiefly displays itself. Here the distinction is plainly marked. The muse of Greece walked upon the earth, or, if

it took wing, its flight was but to the summit of Olympus, the home of the earthborn gods. It never entered that midland of the pure ideal, the home of modern song. The eyes of the Greek saw only the outward aspects of nature, not its pervading spirit. He stood and looked abroad upon nature. We enter into Nature as a part of herself. The universe appealed only to his senses, and culminated in the line of beauty. With us it appeals to the soul, and culminates in its hidden significance. Ulysses, in Homer, casts himself upon the rushes and corn at the river-side, seeing in them only food and rest. Dante, inspired by a deeper vision, girds himself with the rush as the emblem of humility under chastisement.

We admire Homer as we admire the Parthenon, for his harmony of outline and the grace and grandeur of his effects. In all his range of thought he views life only from the physical standpoint. No purely ideal conception enters into his verses. He paints not the mystic sentiment, but the visible image of nature. His song is everywhere the apotheosis of the physical. He has all the merit of the sculptors and architects of his country,-grace, harmony, and artistic finish. The smooth and vigorous flow of its verse, its rich variety, its correct imagery, its pure and lofty diction, are to us the attractive features of the Iliad. can still delight in physical perfection, and we think not of looking there for spiritual sentiment. There is no idealism. The imagery, that most abstract feature of verse, is borrowed wholly from visible nature, and is limited to the most apparent of her infinite similitudes. Storm and calm, the labors of the husbandman, the rising of the sun, all the prominent phases of nature, are appositely applied. But nowhere can we apply to him Shakspere's picture of the bard:

We

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

Airy nothings have no place in Homer's pages. Even his gods are somethings of the most substantial type.