ART. VI. THE RELIGION OF ATHENS.

THE primal, ever-central cult of the Queen of the Ægean was the fairest which the heathen world has ever known. There was in it nothing cruel, vulgar, or unclean. No human sacrifice stained its altar or tainted its air. Its ritual, radiant with poetic beanty, fostered art, not in forms uncouth and monstrous, but of grace and dignity such as modern and even Christian art may copy or imitate but cannot excel. Heathen indeed it was, but men do not gather grapes of thorns; and the germ of a system out of which came such splendors of art, poetry, and philosophy as challenge the rivalry of the later ages must contain special elements of beauty, purity, and energy. Modern research has unfolded so much the close-wrapped mystery of the past that inquiry after first things has become a pleasing recreation. At the dawn of history nations are already counting as divine some natural object or some aspect or phenomenon, and approaching it in worship. The Greek tribes in this matter differed among themselves; the Dorians, best represented by the Spartans, having Apollo, the sun, for their divinity-that is, chief and dominant among many, for

The lively Grecian, in a land of hills,

Rivers, and sounding groves, could find

Fit resting-place for every god.

The Ionians, whose metropolis was Athens, took as patron and supreme object of worship Athené. To her it was given to rule from the Acropolis; here were its chief temple, its grandest statues, its fullest, noblest ritual. Who is this Athené?

Before the Sanskrit was made known in Europe (not a century and a half ago) the name had always been a mystery. To the scandal of etymology it had been derived from the Egyptian Neit, who appears on the tomb of Rameses I. as "Universal Mother," or Nout, "Goddess of the Sky." Such derivation, resting on a single letter, "n," might justify Voltaire's sarcasm, that etymology is a science of words, in which "consonants count for little and vowels for nothing at all." The Sanskrit sheds its light on very many of even our English household words, and still more copiously on our Greek. It gives us ahan, "day," from which comes an adjective of which the

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feminine form is ahand, "early, matinal." Several roots pass from Sanskrit into Greek with a change of h into "0," as hu becomes "Ov-w" and guh becomes "KEVO-w." The h of classical Sanskrit may become dh in the Vedic, as within the Greek itself "eox" becomes "20." "A0ývn" was in Doric Aŋvá, and Αθήνη Αθηνά, this was familiar even at Athens. "Athené" is thus identified as the Dawn, and with this her legendary deeds and attributes easily agree. To-day the Dawn is "A0ývŋ Boúdela," for at its first streaking the peasant yokes his oxen for the field; it is “Ałývn ¿pyávý,” for all labor stirs with the early light; “yλāvs,” the little brown owl, flies forth in the dimness to meet "A0ývn уλavк@ms." Athené springs from the brow of Zeus; her long robe is saffron or golden; she is virgin ever fair; she is in all poetry and mythology harmonious with the personification of the dawn.

Dawn upon the Acropolis! "It is always morning somewhere in the world," and the dayspring wears its charms from land to land, a tireless traveler, a welcome, joyous visitant. But here on this marble height, as on a chosen dwelling-place, it lavishes its wealth of splendors as if it would say, "This shall be my rest forever; here will I dwell, for I have desired it." Where on all this goodly earth does morning brighten over another region like this-over such a disposal of field and grove, of hill and plain, of island and sparkling water? For the worship of this goddess, sprung in perfectness from the brow of Dyaus, the Parthenon-"House of the Virgin "—was built. The venerable wreck of to-day, the work of Pericles, stands on the foundation of an older one that went down in the Persian wars. That had been built by Pisistratus, and there is reason to think that even it had a rude predecessor. The front is eastward, and in its eastern end were the great altar and the great statue of the goddess. Its axis points to a defile in Mount Hymettus, four miles eastward, and precisely in this defile rises the sun at the summer solstice. Here of old, as if to welcome his earliest beam, was a small temple of Apollo Kunigos, "the sun," and here to-day is a chapel and monastery of St. John Kunigos, as forerunner of the Messiah, the Light of the world.

For Athené's worship was reared this Parthenon, the most perfect building ever consecrated to the service of religion. 38-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. VIII.

Within it her statues of ivory and gold showed the purity and the glow of the dawn, and west of it rose, with spear and helmet as guardian of her city, her brazen image cast from weapons gathered at Marathon.

Around Athené, as daughter of Zeus (Dyaus), the broad and mighty Day, and springing in bright armor from his brow, gathers many a woven myth and legend. As from the brow of Zeus she personifies his wisdom; and the brown owl, yλāvs, comrade of the dawn, on her helmet and even on her head, уλavкшnis, or by her side, became the symbol of wisdom.

Athens, by wars, alliances, and trade, came to have relations with many lands, and by policy, by hospitality, or by sincere approval it adopted gods many and various, presiding over the manifold human concerns and the changeful phenomena of nature. Even the sum total of these did not fill the void ever opening in the human heart, which none but the Eternal perfectly occupies; and so, when Paul walked from Piræus to Athens, he saw on his right at Munychia, "as he passed by and beheld their devotions, an altar with this inscription, 'To the Unknown God." This vague supplement to a list of at least three hundred and fifty deities, stood as a confession which Athenian pride would in this way only make, that the Athenian heart felt still a lack of the divine. The apostle came to Athens when her glory of freedom and of material dominion had long since departed, but her glory of art and philosophy remained. She was the school of mankind, and could loftily say, "My mind to me a kingdom is;" and pride of culture is quite as hostile to self-renouncing Christian faith as is sensuality or avarice. Before him, on Mars Hill, are Epicureans, counting pleasure the object and prudence the guide of life, and death the end of all. There, too, are Stoics, believing in duty, in loyalty to providence, in constancy, fortitude, and benevolence, and final absorption into the world-soul with loss of individual being. The preacher's simple facts would have swept the Acropolis of its wealth of altars, and have parted the fair city from the charm of its previous years. The sermon caused (as the Gospel always causes) the thoughts of many hearts to be revealed, and threw light on the peculiar heathen fascinations of the place.

For the heathenism of Athens was embalmed in art and poetry, in philosophy and eloquence. Every charm of the

town was framed in a heathen setting, and its very heathenism dominated the taste and learning of the world. To-day its only objects of interest are survivals of these pagan splendors. Nowhere on earth was ever so high non-Christian glory achieved as here; and Satan, as tempter of Christ, might proudly tell its excellence :

On the Ægean shore a city stands,

Built nobly, pure of air and light of soil;
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits,
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,

City or suburban, studious walks or shades.

The Gospel's scantiness of success at Athens was partly due to some peculiarities of the Greek race which were intensified in the Athenian character. The wide, the vague, the emotional, the feeling of the tender and the profound were not in all their thoughts. In their religious exercises was no soul-pain, no pleading, no tears; and not even at their funerals was grief to be seen-only calmness and almost cheerfulness. They were true children of the morning: as a race they were never more than twenty years old, and they lived in the blooming youth of the world, fashioned between young Achilles and young Alexander. The world to come threw for them neither light nor shade upon this present, and the joy of living amply repaid for them life's pain and labor. This was partly from temperament and partly, it may be, from having a home in a sunny land, in pure air, by bright waters, and beneath sapphire skies. The Greek, though given to sacred demonstrations-to songs and rituals and processions-was of all men the least religious. The Goth, the German, even the Roman and the Celt, fierce and gloomy, were far more religious than our lively Greek, who, full of motion, wit, and curiosity, was never spiritual, sad, foreboding.

All this crowds one's thought as on Mars Hill he recalls the apostle and his sermon. The place is now utterly bare and rude, relying for its fame on history alone. Some Barnumizing divine got here a stone for his Tabernacle, as if, forsooth, the stone could carry inspiration! Here the surroundings are every thing, and they are not portable. Could Mr. Talmage have taken the Acropolis as it looked down upon the preacher, this sky, this air, all this enchanting environment! As those

Athenians listened so have the men of our day listened on that same hill to a missionary, and with no frivolity or ridicule. Perhaps no hearer was as fair of mind as Dionysius the Areopagite; there was among his hearers no woman named Damaris, but none thought " Jesus" and "Anastasis" strange gods. Note the woman named Damaris! Though Athené was a goddess her worshipers had no appreciation of women, nothing of the romantic, nothing of the chivalrous toward her. When in Athenian history was an heroic exploit performed for a woman's sake or by a woman's inspiring? Pericles declared that of women she is best of whom least can be said, and Plato, in his fine theory, found for her no "sphere" but the care of the house and the perpetuation of the species, even when Helen, Andromache, and Antigone were above the horizon in beauty, dignity, and devotion.

This repression of the most susceptible half of the human race, not from barbarism but from conviction, philosophic and inveterate, re-enforced by four centuries of Turkish control, is still felt in the land, and its influence is only now dissolving. Only within a few years have girls come freely to the public schools or have ladies promenaded freely on the avenues of Athens. How different from this was the feeling of those rude Germans who, as Tacitus says, looking upon women with awe, reckoned their advice oracular! That this low estimate of woman hindered Christianity at Athens is clearly proven by what is plain before one's eyes to-day.

One may, then, believe that this levity of temper, this æsthetic type of idolatry, and this abnegation of women made the entrance of Christianity at Athens peculiarly difficult. It also gave Christianity, after entrance, a peculiar type. The heathen mold shaped Christian usages to a shape still traceable. The temples were given over to the service of the new faith, but this service was kept closely akin to that for which they had been erected. Thus the little xvvyós in the cleft of the horizon east of the Acropolis, through which the summer dawn first whitened, became a chapel of the Baptist, the comer foreshowing the Messiah. When a rain is at hand the highest point on the island of Ægina wraps itself in portending clouds, and here was of old a temple of Poseidon, giver of rain, as god of all water. This temple on the peak is to this day the Church of that