heroic efforts of Demosthenes to rouse his countrymen to resistance, she remained under that rule with various vicissitudes until 86 B.C., when, under Sulla, the Roman yoke was imposed upon her. But still the artistic magnificence and literary character of Athens continued until after the middle of the first century, when Paul appeared and preached on Mars' Hill, complimenting their learning, and making it a basis of remonstrance against their superstitions and idolatries.

After this came the Goths and Ostrogoths and Turks, who swept the land with devastation, and introduced misrule, which lasted until 1827, the date at which modern Greece begins.

But we must recur to our personal observations. In coming to Athens from Pireus we enter the city on the south side, which is the business part, and looks more European than Oriental. Indeed, there is much taste and appearance of thrift in the stores and shops. As we reach the north side we come to a public square, in the center of which is a beautiful park, green with tropical plants, and smiling with flowers and ripe oranges, though in latitude thirty-eight degrees, and early in the month of March. On the south side of this square are large business houses; on the east and west the principal hotels; and on the north, crowning a gentle ascent, are the palace and grounds of the young King George. All these buildings are substantial and commodious, but not magnificent. To the right and left of the square, within the radius of one mile, are to be found the best private and public buildings, and all the chief objects of antiquarian interest. Athens nestles between two high bluffs, the Acropolis, five hundred feet above the level of the sea, and Lycabettus, still higher, and surrounded by the sunny plains of Attica, which may be made as productive and gardenesque as Scotland under the hand of cultivation and art.

OBJECTS OF INTEREST.

1. The Stadium, where Grecian games were practiced. This is a level arena a little way out of town, about one hundred feet in length and one hundred and fifty in breadth, lying in the shape of an ox-bow. It is encompassed on three sides by sloping ground, say fifty feet high, just steep enough to form the base of receding seats, bringing the spectators in full view of the arena.

The Stadium looks now like a natural recess into the hill-side; but it is evident that it was originally put in shape by excava tion, because in the curve of the ox-bow there is a subterranean passage which obviously served as a way of ingress and exit. But oh, the vicissitudes of time! the Stadium is now a pasturefield and play-ground. Sheep crop the grass and bleat for their young, and children sport, where once the élite of Athens sat in chairs of Pentelic marble, and fifty thousand people were held entranced over contingent results as the contests went on. But oh, all is reduced to the silence of death and the decay of the grave. Three hundred years before Christ, and eighteen centuries of our Lord's era, have swept over their ashes, and consigned all their memories except a few to eternal oblivion, and their souls to immutable destiny.

2. A second object of interest is the Olympium,' a sumptuous temple built on ground held sacred from the earliest times, and separated from the Stadium by the River Ilissus. Hadrian's arch, which formed the magnificent gate-way into the Olympium, and fifteen of the mighty columns, sixty-four feet in height and over seven feet in diameter, still stand; two lie prone and broken on the ground, victims of the gnawing teeth of time. If Christian civilization is faithful to her interests these relics will be preserved, and, like the Pantheon, at Rome, tell the story of the transition of the people from heathenism to Christianity.

3. A third and principal object is the Acropolis. A perpendicular rock on three sides, facing the city and approached and mounted from the rear by a winding carriage-way of gradual and easy ascent. Its summit is crowned with the ruins of four or five temples, the chief of which is the Parthenon. Nothing but its foundation and pillars remain. These columns are not monoliths, but circular sections of stone placed one upon the other, and so closely jointed that the scams can scarcely be detected. I called the attention of Dr. Constantine to these joints. He said, "I will show you a seam that you cannot find at all." He pointed to a spot in the steps of the Parthenon. No junction was discernible; nothing but a place where a piece had been broken out made it possible to discover the joint after the closest inspection.

Contiguous to the Acropolis, and separated from it by a road

I stood on

way, is Mars' Hill, where Paul preached to the court and scholars of Athens. Mars' Hill, like the Acropolis, is a precipitous rock, though not nearly so high. Three of its sides overlook the city; one slopes off to the ordinary level. The Areopagus is reached by a flight of steps cut in the solid rock, some of which are broken, others entirely gone. By these Paul and his hearers must have ascended. the rocky pulpit, and rehearsed the words of Paul. The surroundings inspire just such thoughts as Paul's discourse contains. In front, the city and the Olympium; at the right, the Parthenon; at the left, the temple of Theseus; in the rear, the rostrum of Demosthenes; Plato's Villa in the distance in one direction, the place where Socrates drank the hemlock in the other. In the midst of such associations, Paul, that intrepid man of God, who never was ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, sowed the seed which has proved itself ineradicable unto the present day.

The Parthenon is a double reminder. As a specimen of art, it tells of the highest civilization under heathenism. As a ruin, it reminds us of the utter incompatibility of culture with polytheism and idolatry. Here we have an instance. Culture and genius in the person of Phidias built the temple and gave it to Athens and the worship of the gods. But the same culture that developed the genius of Phidias and Praxiteles also brought out Xenophanes the philosopher, and other monotheistic teachers, who attacked the popular religion, and sapped it to its very foundations. Thus the cause of the splendid temple was also the cure of its false worship. It is a noteworthy fact that knowledge and refinement collide with, antagonize, and finally subvert all false religions.

Not so with the Christian religion: it thrives on the pabulum of education and literature, locks arms with culture, keeps step with science, takes a position in advance of all knowledge, and invites to a higher plane-a plane far above the proud soarings of our vainglorious scientists. The result was that when Paul came declaiming against idolatry and superstition on Mars' Hill he gained an easy victory, because the philosophers had gone before, as John the Baptist, and prepared the way. Ever since Paul spoke on Mars' Hill polytheism and idolatry have been smitten with decay-struck with death. They live, but they

live as the roots of trees live when the trunk has been cut away. They live to rot.

4. The Pnyx. This is the place where Demosthenes delivered his orations against Philip of Macedon. It lies at the edge of the city, about a hundred rods back of Mars' Hill. The bema is a rock platform, say twenty feet long and half as wide, and elevated some four feet from the ground. Behind is a natural wall of rock; in front, a little circular field slightly descending from the rostrum. The acoustic properties of this place are remarkable. I stood five hundred feet from the rostrum, and heard Dr. Constantine distinctly as he spoke in a conversational tone.

Here the classic orator of greatest antiquity gave us a type of oratory for our schools and public speakers, which, perhaps, will never perish. As showing the tenacity with which the Greeks adhere to their national life and customs, the Pnyx is still used as a place for public assembly and political harangues. A meeting was recently held there to consider the "Eastern Question," in which the Greeks are more deeply interested than any other nation. Thus, after a lapse of two thousand years, speeches were made by the professors of Athens University on the spot where Demosthenes stood, rivaling in spirit and eloquence, and perhaps excelling in learning, the orations of that great orator. The air of Greece is thick with independence, and the whole of Greece impregnate with hostility to the Moslem Government and religion.

On the opposite side of the town, at the base of towering Lycabettus, we find the works of modern art-the beginning of the Hellenic resurrection. Here are the Parliament House, the University, the Academy of Fine Arts, and most of the new and fine residences. Athens is the capital and chief city more on account of its prestige and ruins than its local advantages or commercial importance. But, having a population of fifty thousand, fine scenery, and all the government buildings, it is bound to be the chief city of Greece for some time to come. But she will not retain her supremacy without competition. Indeed, the chief commercial centers to-day are Syra, Corfu, Petras, and Pireus. And when the projected ship-canal is cut through the isthmus, these latter places will have the decided advantage, for then the Corinthian gulf will be the great highway to Asia

Minor and the Orient. And this improvement, in connection with the railway now under discussion, will give to Greece a maritime interest never before realized.

Petras and Corfu are large shipping ports, situated on the gulf of Corinth. Each has a population of twenty-five thousand. Corfu, on an island of the same name, is a lovely city, built on a high bluff, jutting out into the sea, in the midst of wild and deep ravines, which make it a romantic summer resort.

But leaving the cities, Greece has but little enchantment to the view. It is a small, rock-bound, hilly country, with thin soil, few streams, narrow valleys, and no forests except in the north. Parnassus and contiguous mountains are said to be well timbered with pines and oaks.

Greece has a prospect of enlargement. The Congress of Berlin, in 1878, advised a cession of territory by Turkey, which, if she obtains, and Crete is annexed, will nearly restore her ancient boundary. And to such restitution Providence evidently points. Indeed, the great powers of Europe could not do a wiser or more humane thing than to interject a Greek nation between Russia and Egypt, Syria and India.

England must cease to depend on Turkey to resist the encroachments of the Russian Bear. Turkey is a doomed nation, and Mohammedanism is a doomed religion. That government cannot rise to the civilization of the nineteenth century, and Mohammedanism cannot transfigure itself into Christianity. Both must perish. The Turk is every-where, like falling autumn leaves, the symbol of decay. But the Greeks represent vitality and recuperation, like the shooting vegetation and bursting flowers of spring. Like Milton's angels, "Vital in every part, they can but by annihilation die." The merchants who take the lead in all the important industries of that belt of States stretching from the Adriatic into Asia Minor are Greeks, and in numbers they form a larger factor than any other race. It has been estimated that there are four millions of Greeks now under Turkish rule in and about the Egean Sea, two hundred and fifty thousand in Constantinople alone, ninety thousand in Cyprus, a half million in Crete, and so on.

The truth is, the Greek is as indigenous to the Ægean Sea and its outlying countries as the black man is to Africa. It is theirs