may easily become a fanatic, especially when associated with the tenet that all sickness is covered by the atonement as surely as all sin.

In view of this examination of premillennialism, which we have weighed and found wanting a basis in Scripture and in reason, we would advise all Christians to bestow their gifts for the world's evangelization upon their own denominational missions, which proceed upon methods tried and approved by experience and by that book styled by Gladstone "the impregnable Rock of God's Word."

Since Christ uttered the great commission, "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations," no man has been called to preach the Gospel for a witness, or for any other purpose. The kingdom of Christ is come, and the King is now, and will be, invisibly present with his heralds "alway, even unto the end of the world," having abolished forever the former distinction of places and made the whole world a temple for spiritual worship. There is now "one flock" (Revised Version) and "one shepherd," who has gathered "together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad," putting "no diference between the Jew and the Greek," having "broken down the middle wall of partition between us." That wall Christ will never rebuild. He takes no backward steps. We "who are Christ's are Abraham's seed, whose circumcision is that of the heart in the Holy Spirit." Our desired city is not the Jerusalem "which now is, and is in bondage with her children," but the free Jerusalem "which is above, . . . the mother of us all." Toward this heavenly city all believers in Christ are setting their faces, and on the tombstone of every one may Dean Alford's epitaph be appropriately chiseled, slightly improved, Diversorium Viatoris Hierosolymam Novam ProficiscentisThe Wayside Inn of a Traveler Journeying to the New Jerusalem.

Daniel Steele

ART. IV.-ANTE-AGAMEMNONA.

If one were sailing with Raleigh where a stream freshened far out the salt and surging sea he would wish to know whence the goodly water came. If he turned against its flow until his prow was stopped by some ledge athwart the stream, or by the tangled luxuriance of a tropical forest, his thought would not end with the arrest of his voyage. The river need not be one "whose foam is amber and whose gravel gold," but from his enforced anchorage he might see it fling life and verdure over the savannas below. He might see as flotsam and jetsam on its current, drifting rich and rare from mysterious regions, choice products of men's skill and toil, whether ministering to common needs or to the higher sensibilities. Dull would he be who did not long to pass to the upper stretches of the stream and see under what cliffs and forests, by what fields and towns, this water had for long leagues been flowing.

With feeling like this one finds himself at Homer, barred from the beyond. "Ye may not enter," as carved on the Homeric pillars, provokes entrance rather than forbids it, and the heart leaps up to require that which is past, as if the past, like the present and the future, were in our appointed dominion. This feeling haunts one like an agony as he travels the Homeric lands. At the Heraion, where the kings swore fealty to Agamemnon, he wonders who were the kings before Agamemnon. At Mycenae he swings the iron wicket beneath those lions that are the oldest sculpture in Europe and enters the solemn precinct of the bygone. At his right in that Agora, " making men illustrions," sat a hundred councilors; at his left were vaults for kingly treasures, and the massive walls looked down on marbles covering royal dust. Beyond are gray fields and the white-surfed, wine-hued sea. "Eternal summer gilds them yet." What manifold stir of life, what strong-armed energy, what speech and song, what "fair women and brave men" must once have filled this town! Musing there alone, one's dream, which is "not all a dream," takes a dim, historic form.

The unhistoric realm of Hellenic life is on its near side bounded by the Troica; on the far, by the coming of the Aryans into "Javan and the isles." Its breadth may be that of Ba

laam's vision when, "in a trance with his eyes open," he looked down a thousand years and saw in the horizon the ships of Chittim and brought Greece into the sacred record. A long, long darkness, but under this far-floating gloom great work was done by unseen workers.

And first, the development of language. The mystery of, speech was solved and simplified. The shaping of the shorthand of Tyrian merchants into the Greek alphabet was a deed skillful and beneficent. Still better was the modification of the language itself. Assuming Schleicher's Alt-Indien as the primitive Aryan speech, and the Sanskrit as the oldest branch, the type of the earliest Greek may easily be outlined. If one traces our English from Beowulf to Shakespeare through what struggles does he find it passing, under what complication of energies, what agonies of mutilation and assimilation! Its case system, its ugliness of compounding, where are they? How clear and simple in structure, how vigorous in movement, as it now proceeds in majestic march for the conquest of the world! This a thousand years did for the English, and the like was in a commensurate period done for the Greek. Compared with the Sanskrit, its stationary sister, or the Latin, older but unmanipulated, the Greek issues from demiurgic darkness into historic day, "a crystalline delight," complete in every linguistic quality, tuneful now as ever beneath its sapphire skies, fit for gods and godlike men.

In this unhistoric millennium the Greek, like his Aryan kinsmen, "knew not God;" but his was a lively growth in the apprehension of the divine. The powers of nature become persons. Thus Erem, "the greyhound," had in India been applied to the wind. "The greyhound of the gods," said one, when the clouds of the monsoon began tossing wildly in the sky, "is driving up their cows." This crude conception the Greeks refined into Hermes, 'Epucías, "young hound," a person lithe and graceful, the messenger of the gods, the gatherer of souls to Hades, the patron of pursuits calling for ingenuity, as art, trade, and literature, and gymnastics. Or, take Athena, Ahanah (Sanskrit), "the dawn." In the freshness of the early world the dayspring was counted the most wondrous and affecting of all phenomena, but on the plains of India the beholder viewed it only as a phenomenon pure and simple. "The daughter of

the sky," divine indeed, is a very vague personality, "wearing her brilliant garment." "She rises up, moving everyone, leader of the days, gold-colored, lovely to behold." "Shine for us, thou who lengthenest our days, thou highborn dawn, give us riches far and wide!" Not unlike that might any poet of our day write, in our usual rhetorical personification. Athena, einerging from the unregistered Hellenic spaces, is no longer a phase or a power of nature. She is a person sprung from the mighty forehead of the morning sky; she calls the world to life; she scatters the monsters of the dark; she gathers to herself those attributes, the sum of which made her the entrancing patroness of "Athens, the eye of Greece," fit resident of the Parthenon, "the brightest gem Greece wore on all her zone." In like manner one might trace the other personages of the Olympian and find each by transformation brought from something rude, gross, and material to something refined, cultured, and personal, and the air of Greece untainted by human. sacrifices. This movement in historic times went on making for theistic truth, and the interchangeable Oɛoi and ɛós of Socrates are but thinly apart from the only true God. Thus, untraced Greek thought was "a schoolmaster" leading toward theism. The traceable movement of idolatry is toward the coarse and clumsy. By what energy of conception was the process here reversed and the natural made intellectual and spiritual? It was not one man's work; it was "one man's wit and many men's wisdom," the thought of generations set to speech and music at last by one great master.

Or, we may look at the political outcome of these cloudwrapped centuries. In India one sees the primitive system of patriarchal headship early degenerating into absolutism. The masses, even when arrived at some intellectual development, have that scared look in the face, that shrinking acquiescence in temper, that to this day so marks oriental peoples. Not so in the Hellenic sphere. There is a headship, but it is filled by a hero whose qualities fit him for the place, who is first in war and in peace alike. There is a senate of high-souled venerable men; there is an assembly where even Thersites, if he will but be other than impudent in his babbling, may, as of ancient right, speak his mind before kings and those who are in authority, and even intimate "the exploded theory" that rulers derive their

just powers from the consent of the governed. The political instinct came to be a fixed law of life, and when history opens the man has already come to be a citizen, a character now for the first time found on earth. The man is completed in the state, as the Christian is completed in the Church. He is in it as a part of a living organism; to him life, society, and state are terms nearly interchangeable. This took a clearer form in the republics of historic times, but at the dawn of history the idea of citizenship is already fully developed; the compromise between freedom and authority, between will and law, is thoroughly understood and accepted, and each member of a community is habituated to be at the same time ἄρχων and ἀρχόμενος. It is not to be said that the Greek ideal of government was complete; it favored the strong and did little for the feeble. It was charged against the Homeric usages that they approved of the misuse of the poor; and evidently the value and the claims of simple human personality had not become well defined. The Jews, better than the Greeks, understood the rights of the helpless; but who would not choose the rudest Greek state before the despotism of Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar ? The history of France shows how difficult it is, even with the modern heritage of ideas, to form a free and sovereign body of citizens. By what struggles of change, each doing its share, must Hellas have reached that condition of orderly political thought and usage by which each community became a state and the nós, the duos, ruled not merely the conduct but the hopes, the affections of the individual. This conception of an interlacing political fabric, sufficient unto itself, grew unseen by historic eyes; but it was not, like the prophet's gourd, the hasty product of one hot night, nor did it perish by one sting of sharp hostility. It was the fertile breeder of many later constitutions, one feature of which we in fact sorely need today, that which declares the citizen not zealous of the public welfare to be not merely useless but positively harmful and traitorous.

Of art it would be strange if we did not find in this period some preliminary work already achieved. This was the time of joyous, exuberant youth, whose overflow of energy and passion finds its consummation in the typical young man, Achilles. All art originates in surplus-surplus of spirits, of leisure, and