A- HO. o o .A V '*+ ^ ^ *' O o "A P^ ^:':--^- A^K X ° . , - An r^ A- .* 3 A> O „ $&g$/AQ, ° "A,V , Aa A\WA*A^lf^AA o A *o^ G 1 *°^ 1" I "W ■Agp^ y 0' „AA- • <-£5AT\ , r ^ C m >?>- & s > v 4>c'///AA> * \^ * C-AWA^ «* •y /X ; ^f¥. ; > V A- °, ^ -! t l " A^ 0^ » r ^> ^ V v> o « o ^U > ^.^-^ """^ •S- ^r.rY :4\%\ A ^ . •-! ■ ^ \„ -yWs ** % -mm fe O ^ A < h . o ^3mZ^n?^ ^_ <*^ A ^ c ° N c , ^ A- A A sV ^' -A|gA »?^ „h°. %^ ^' > .A V '^^V u ^ -"iS^Mit -av^ : ,s^ <^>. ' • • s * <0 1 . V °^ " - ° .v 8 •s s ' NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. BY JAMES MASON HOPPIN. •'Si forte quaeris aliquem locum altum, aliqueui locum sanctum, iutus exhibo to lemnlum Deo. In templo vis orare, in te ora.' 1 NEW YORK: D . APPLETON AND COMPANY, 346 & 348 BROADWAY. LONDON': 16 LITTLE BRITAIN. M.DCCC.LIV. lUt-l^l^^ PS /? I heard the oratorio at the Sing Akadamie, in Berlin ; and the immense orchestra is perfectly silent upon the recitation of these words, until the last word ' : light" is uttered ; then it bursts into one magnificent crash of har- mony : louder and louder, swifter and swifter, higher and higher, so that the light seems to stream up into a very blaze of universal and glorious effulgence. It is related, that toward the close of Haydn's life, the i: Creation " was performed in Yienna, in honor of his birth-day. The old man himself was present, and, in this passage of the light, the richness and magnificence of his own music com- pletely overwhelmed him. With streaming eyes, lifting his hands to heaven, he exclaimed : ' : Not from me — it came from above ! " The great masters of Germany are now generally known and appreciated in America. I have spoken of Sebastian Bach — perhaps he is the least known of all, in America, yet he was a marvellous genius, and, if I be rightly informed, is considered in Germany as standing at the head of the learned school of music. He has accom- plished incredible feats in harmony, evincing such power of abstract consecutive thought, as in philosophy would have made him a Laplace. Although the arrangement of his notes is greatly involved and difficult, yet their united harmony is sweet and noble, and the common criticism pronounced upon them is, that not one note could have a different position without destroying the beauty and sym- metry of the whole. It has sometimes appeared to mc, 110 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. not that too much stress is laid upon the unapproachable grace and sweetness of Mozart, but that not enough is con- ceded to him of sublimity and power. Often, when least expected, his music takes leave of earth, and soars circling up the heavens, and again rushes down, like a falling arch- angel, into so profound depths, that we start at the bare verity of the revelation. But when we discourse of sub- limity, spirituality, mightiness of passion, and scope of imagination, let room be for the monarch of the lyre ! We can describe the ocean until its billows load our own sinking ship ; we can sketch pictures of the storm until its bolts scorch our own house ; so we can delineate the cha- racteristics of the eloquent in Art, until our own minds become too absorbed for such calm criticism. And who will thus calmly and accurately criticise the music of Beethoven ? He who commences, in a critical frame, to listen to one of his Symphonies, will, perhaps, at its close, be lost to himself. 1 Where has he been? What has he been doing ? His mind had, for a time, slipped from the obedience of its ruling volition ; it had been seized in the grasp of a mightier than itself, and hurried away into unknown, far-off, and spiritual realms. While hear- ing the current-like, sweeping, ascending, sphery strains of Beethoven, as if they were the weaving harmonies of the stars that " sang together," at the birth of creation, my soul went forth into a .firmament of pure light, ocean-like, 1 The old Greek word e^iffTTjfxi, to take out of itself, expresses the idea. GERMAN MUSIC. Ill illimitable, bathing itself in billows of sweetness, splendor, and glory : was a soul that had forgot all its sins, feeble- ness, mortality. I count it with the sight of the High Alps, with the greatest things of my life, to have heard the music of Beethoven in his own responsive land. G* DELPHI. In company with a glittering-eyed Greek guide, a physical Hercules, I landed at the site of ancient iEgium, opposite the Crissean sea and the mountains of Phocis, at the spot where Plutarch is said to have planted a plane tree with his own hands. Our abode for the night was a small chamber with four large windows, closed with board shutters, and with no furniture save an old earthen cooking vessel, which stood on the hearth. But this was marvellous quarters for poor Greece. "Wrapping myself in an ample Greek cloak I slept that night upon the floor of my room. To- wards morning I was awakened by the most violent tem- pest I ever remember to have beheld. The hail wrapped the sky in an icy curtain, crashing and swingiDg over the earth, beating us as we lay, through the broken roof. The lightning was of vermilion, broadly inflaming all things like the red light of Padalon, and the thunder was incessant, splitting, and awful, as if Hellenian Zeus had awoke from his sleep of ten centuries, and was calling in wrath to his old forgetful land. The tempest soon 116 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. settled into a dark, gusty, sluicing rain, and all hopes of crossing the Gulf of Corinth to Delphi for that day was idle. At a little deal table, which Andreas procured, I spread out my books and papers, but the frail tripod trembled at every storm-blast, and the papers were whirled and scattered like the leaves of Dodona. On the next morning the sky having somewhat light- ened, Andreas hired a small craft to take us over the Gulf. The wind, however, was feeble, and we were all the day making some ten English miles. The sun set streamingly magnificent, the clouds trailing around it being of a thousand dreamlike shapes, changing their golden hues into deepest crimsons and purples, and rolling their fiery columns in different directions, like a marching barbarian army in vermilion and gold. It was the same setting sun which flung its blinding beams into the eyes of the astonished Asians, on that eve, when, after the hard fought day, victory turned for the Greeks at Marathon. A bright light shone here and there upon the stern, bare mountains of the Locrian coast, while the rest of their surface was swathed in the deep shadow of a tempest gather- ing in the northeast, over the monarch tops of Parnassus. The sails, the forms of the crew, all objects on board of our little vessel were tinged with this solemnly bright light, which soon, however, grew dull as the sun dis- appeared, and the slow, black thundercloud quenched the heavens. The rain began to plash in big drops ; the sea commenced to heave and moan, and the boat at the irregular blasts which swept by her, careened on her side DELPHI'. 117 and threw the foam seatteringly over the deck. AH thought that a tempest similar to the rack which had mingled earth and sky on the previous night was again to occur. The Peloponnesian sailors grew pale be- neath the bronze of their cheeks, and even herculean An- dreas lost something of the manly depth of his voice. But a change sudden, and in appearance quite mysterious took place, and we saw one faint star after another shoot out from a thinner curtain of the sky, and then on the far edge of the sea horizon, bursting rapidly through the clouds, the low swimming moon, as if sailing upon the bosom of the sea, stretched her sceptre of long light upon the tossing steel-black waves, which seemed to bow to the queenly gentle will, and gradually sunk from their rage. The wind hushed into sighs and silence, splendid stars crowded the firmanent, and there was a glassy calm. We drew in nearer shore, and anchored for the night- Lying on the open deck, whenever I unclosed my eyes during the night, there were the silent stars above, count- less, far brighter, though serener than in our mistier At- lantic skies, each star a moon of light, and within the shadow of the great mountains which circle Delphi, and un- der the very sacred peaks of Parnassus, I felt the influence of the old Greek mountain nature harmonizing, as nature sometimes does, profoundly with the mind, and, of all kinds of nature, over my own mind, mountains have the great- est sway.- Mountains were the inspiration of the ancient muse of G-recce, as Parnassus now silently attest- ed. They have the power q{ ever changing life. There 118 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. is something like the moods of a powerful spiritual life in mountains, which was not lost on the suscep- tible Greek mind, for mountains, whether in G-reece or Switzerland, are never the same ; every day, and every hour in the day brings upon them some impressive change ; as belonging more to heaven than earth, they seem, in certain states of the air to soar spiritualized, transcenden- tal, emptied of bulk, and floating in space : then again, towards night, or under the frown of storms, they become black, ponderous, oppressive to the soul, the equilibriums of the planet and the thrones of power j then they laugh and flash in the full noon sun, vast altars of light and happi- ness ; at times the clouds play grotesque tricks with them, dragging their enormous serpentine shadows over them, or wreathing themselves around their peaks like vapory garlands in the slow dance of gigantic spirits of air ; then the whirling mist sweeps on like a spirit host, and in a moment the great forms grow dim and fade away ; and then again the curtain of vapor parts in enormous rifts, showing portions of the wet sombre mountain from base to peak. But now it was a serene and solemn scene ; the still stars glittering around the silvered and distant top of Parnassus, like a diadem, — like Poesy crowned with Immortality. The next morning found us still becalmed, but by dint of hard rowing at the sweeps, we rounded into the little bay of Salona, at whose head we disembarked, where once stood the ancient populous Cirrha. The scenery here was of unrelieved loneliness. The mountains were bare of DELPHI. 119 all vegetation, excepting a kind of short red heath, that gives a scorched look to the rock, as if a huge fire had swept over the mountain, Add to this red-tinted rock and mountain, the water wherever it is seen, of the most intense sparkling blue, beyond even that of permitted art, and a sailless gleaming waste, and let all be still and solemn, with no sound of men, rushing of prows, lowing of cattle, singing of birds, and one may have a tolerable idea of much of Grecian scenery at this day. In Attica, the scenery has a more gentle pensiveness ; the wild bar- renness is softened by gleams of beauty shining through the shroud of death and desolation. There appears still a hidden promise of power in the wan and wasted features, if indeed it be not a divine law that a land flowers but once, and that the very causes of its decay exist to pre- vent those perfect combinations which result in greatness. The contrast of the past and present, and the poetry and power of the antique, moved me more in Greece than in Italy ; Greece has a more pathetic beauty than Italy, wholly yielded up as it is to nature and glorious mem- ory. But the land, it must be said, as a general thing, is a truly savage land ; and the Greeks themselves, out of the few larger towns, are as savage as their land, and there is apparently the least of tractability in them, nor would it seem as if their fierce, bright, flashing eyes could be soft- ened any more than the wild panther's. The lonely muleteer or herdsman whom you meet upon the mountain path, looks at you with a malign expression, and in coun- try and town, from shepherd to areopagite, the hand is 120 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. right gracefully accustomed to grasp the inseparable pis- tol or dagger. But the modern Greeks have wrought their own freedom, and a shadow of dignity and sublimity has thus fallen upon them, rendering them sacred from a nar- row and fastidious condemnation. To come back to the little bay of Salona. We pro- cured horses at our place of landing to carry us on and up to Delphi, the owners of them accompanying us, and stri- ding along by our side in the hot sun, clad in shaggy sheep- skins after the old Dorian fashion. We first traversed a long ascending plain, patched with the wild olive tree, and then commenced climbing the mountain upon the Corin- thian track to Delphi. We stopped and drank at the fountain of Crissa, the classic name retained — "Python the rocky, Crissa the divine." As we approached the site of Delphi, the marks of the old Delphian chariot way were visible, bearing us back by a leap, ten hundred years or so. Upon a sudden turn in this zigzag, rock-cloven path, we saw the site of Delphi before us under a symmetrically curving mountain wall, sloping down into a grandly deep and sombre gorge. We stopped at a little kahn, kept by a Turkish woman who had turned Christian, the few houses on the spot tak- ing the name of the village or demos of Castri. The ancient City of the Oracle was reared upon a series of broad am- phitheatrical terraces still remaining, cut in the living rock, and helped by huge masonry, as if done for eternity. It is a gloomy, mountainous, rugged and commanding DELPHI. 121 spot, a place of serpents and eagles, of mist, thunder, and rushing winds ; a colossal rock-based throne of old heathen power, where broad shadows sleep, and the stern mountains keep watch around, where one does not feel like smiling, or talking, but like dreaming, and his dreams will be of a gigantic ante-world of Silence and" old Night," of Uranos and Cronos, of wide-browed Saturn, huge as Athos, and of Prometheus bleeding on his crag. In the centre of the mountain wall, which rises perpendicularly and blackly behind the sloping plain of the city, stand two lofty adelphic peaks, between which, slides down the Castalian spring. From the narrow fissure which divides these two immense rocks or mountains, as if split by a shattering blow of Poseidon, about half up their summit, come streaming forth over the smooth channelled marble, the sweet cool waters that once bestowed the gift of pro- phecy. The mountain from which it flows, may perhaps by a poetic license, be called the base of Parnassus, but it is a long distance from the real mountain, which is not indeed visible from it. There is still the ancient cistern or reservoir hollowed from the rock, which gathered the inspiring waters. A little way down from this, on the first great terrace of the rocky plain, once shone against the gloomy back-ground of mountain, the magnificent fane of Apollo, fronted with purest Parian marble, the archi- traves hung around with the golden bucklers taken at Marathon, the pediments ornamented with statues of the sister of Apollo, the Muses and the Thyades, containing in its inner eella the great gilded statue of Phoebus Apollo, and in the pillared hall the sculptured image of old 122 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. Homer, crowded with the grandest works of art. with gods, demigods, and heroes, with the original of the Apollo Belvi- dere breathing in triumph, enshrining the ancient golden tables, and the most sacred relics of the religion of Greece, as the temple on Mount Moriah, reverently to make the com* parison, held the ark, the candlestick, the rod, and the shew- bread, and collecting from age to age the riches of the Hellenic faith in a tangible form, until the incredible sum of them inflaming the imagination of the Greeks, at length burst through the spiritual awe, and kindled the rolling fires of sacred wars. But for ages anterior, back to an unrecorded antiquity, Delphi formed the only point of moral unity amid the strongly repulsive tribes and states of Greece, or was the highest spiritual peak in Greece ; the only one serenely above the storms of passion, interest and conflict. 1 Here was the holiest seat of the Greek religion, its mount of vision, its heavenly communion, its throne of prophecy, which indeed rose sublimely before the spirit- ual eye of all the Pagan world, and from the remotest re- gions formed the great centre of pilgrimage, offering and adoration. Delphi was the common seat of the universal mythical religion of antiquity. 2 Even before the legen- dary age of Edipus, before the song of Troy itself swept 1 Even to the time of the first Peloponnesian war, the first article of the treaty of peace between Athens and Sparta, was that Athens might enjoy untrammelled, all the privileges of the temple, oracles* and sacred games. — Grote. 2 to iepov koivov — Strabo. — Tpnroda noivov. — Euripides. Com- mune humani generis oraculum. — Livy. — DodweWs Greece, DELPHI. 123 on the shell of the Homeric hymn, the oracle of Delphi gave dark response, moulding the fates of men, families, cities and nations, and ruling the policy of Greece itself, to draw another comparison of the true and the false, as Horeb and Carmel ruled the civil policy of Israel. Here the leaders of still unconquered armies, laying aside the helm, awaited in pale prostration the mysterious announce- ment of glory or defeat, life or death. Here Rome came and bent her august head, feeling in her gigantic heart some faint shoots and pangs of a religious aspiration, confusedly and secretly acknowledging a will higher than her own ; and can it be doubted that the religious feeling, original faculty, sense or emotion, which binds man to God and to a superior spiritual awe and obligation, — the inborn principle of natural religion, was really stirred and drawn upon in the worship of Delphi ; and we would even hope that a beam of the supernatural however distorted, a sense of the divine however false, a trust of superior power concerning itself for inferior humanity however dim, an evidence of " the feeling after God" how- ever blind, trembled on these hoary shrines, piercing gol- denly through their crimson writhing smoke, — or that their philosophy was self-deception rather than fraud, de- lusion rather than the linking together of generations and centuries to nurture a solemn deceit and utter a lie. Undeniably the ancient heathen world, at least until the philosophic age, believed that Apollo, a divine being, here slew the Pytho, and founded at Delphi his own especial dwelling, as the revealer of unknown things to men. 124 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. The explanations which Plutarch gives us of the Py- thian Oracles, might indeed apply to one lower, looser view of inspiration itself, that not the language nor the measure of the verse proceeded from the god, but that God communicated the intuitions, and kindled up a light in the human soul on the future. The evidence, however, of some of the best of the heathen is decidedly opposed even to the sincerity itself, of the oracles. Demosthenes declared in a public oration, that the oracle of Delphi, the most sacred of all, had been bought over to Philip ; and many en- tirely credible ancient writers have spoken out boldly of the shrines being invented and supported wholly by human craft; and when power is grasped in any age through the spiritual susceptibility, it is not easily let go. Christianity alone, by her moral brightness and truth, has chased Apollo to far realms beyond the rim of the outer world-ocean. She has banished him as a god then and now, has burned and consumed his marble altar ; but his lyre she has strung again, and wakes it to strains awful and sweet as the heavenly thundering of Dante, the organ tones of Milton, the mountain melodies of Wordsworth. The only Pytho- ness whom I saw at Delphi, was a raven-haired Castriote maiden, a priestess of simple nature, who, with a water- pitcher on her classic head, looked at me with eyes full of dark wonder, that a stranger should examine so curiously the gently singing spring, whence she and her mother be- fore her had all their lives drawn pure earthly water without having one pang of superior life. I plucked a leaf from a century-twisted olive tree that thrust its DELPHL 125 strong struggling arms up through the antique fragments of the temple ; and the man in whose crown of honor I would weave it, is that noble fellow-countryman who has carried to the land of Apollo the pure faith of the Gospel, and in suffering has interpreted there the lively " Oracles of God." IftntSSSttS. PAKNASSUS. Delphi is lone, low and incomplete without Mount Par- nassus, the cloudy birthspot of the prophetic spring, the far skyey dwelling of the uttered inspiration. The morning when we started for the Mount of Song, was clear star light, and the sky was bright, but when we had penetrated into the inner foldings of the mountains, a sudden and almost total blackness came over the heavens, so that our craggy path was revealed only by scarlet gleams of light- ning. It is quite impossible to give an idea of the thun- der and lightning of Greece, where mountain, sea, and sun are so mingled together as to form a vast electrical machine, over which an almost continual flashing plays and we wonder not that the vivid Greek mind read in the lightning and thunder the tremendous world-expression of Olympian emotion. "VVe struggled on for about an hour in this tempest, the rain falling in sheets, until we reached some low stone uninhabited hovels of the mountain shepherds, where a knot fire and a cold breakfast restored our spirits, and as morning began to break, the storm gradually ceased 5 and we mounted our horses amid the slow-falling golden 7 130 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. rain-drops, which the sun darted through. makiDg the whole earth glisten, "Turning with splendor of his precious eye The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold," and the last low roars of the thunder died away in the far Thessalian valleys. It was a perfect crystal morning, a day as of the time when the human eye saw the chariot of Apollo in the sun, the quick flash of the divine wheels in every broken ray — the toss of the golden-maned steeds in every shimmer of light ; and the exulting hope of a fine view from Parnassus — so seldom granted — animated me greatly. Two hours sharp riding over a difficult path, brought us to the foot of the mountain, near the summit of which is the Cave of Corycia, the old habitation of the god Pan. Near the mouth of the cavern, three or four great white stalactites hanging from the roof like gigan- tic teeth, standing out against the pitch gloom beyond, form a curious earth-throat, and make a fit home for so grotesque a being ; the ancient body of what was wild and capricious, yet not on the whole unkind in nature. We at length descended into the broad but low plain, upon whose opposite side rose grandly, and swellingly ab- rupt, the immense bulk of Parnassus ; a mountain of light- colored limestone, still further whitened, sublimed and glorified in the intense light of the heavens ; a mountain with a long ridgy back, indented toward its northern ex- tremity with a deep hollow like the seat of an oriental saddle, which is terminated in a somewhat bolder and PARNASSUS. - 131 loftier peak, giving the bicepted aspect attributed to it by the poets, and in which the Latins follow the Greeks with their usual docility. After racing over the plain, and climbing up the lower gentler slopes of Parnassus, we dismounted in a grove of beech trees, and a Castriote war- beaten herdsman and myself commenced climbing the mountain on foot. Our way lay at first in easier ascent, through idyllic scenery — whole parks of bending vener- able beech, pine, and evergreen oak trees — gray monu- mental looking rocks lifting themselves out of the living green of the plain, hiding shadowy ivy-tangled briery- mouthed caves — clear rapid brooks slipping over the bending unworn grass, and in truth, here and there a shepherd, with a crook, tending his long-haired Parnas- sian goats. Soon, however, the scenery grew more soli- tary, wild, stern, with trees cropped by the avalanche — precipices deep and huge, — shattered shaggy segments of the mountain — savage gorges bristling with haggard pine ; vegetation at last wholly ceased ; and we emerged upon the bare great neck of the mountain, above all the lower gods of fields, streams, and forests, in the company of the grand Olympians alone, paying for the insane ambition, by crawling like wounded worms slowly and wearily up the far-shooting height, over sharp-edged and loosely detached stones, which lacerating the feet, rendered the climbing almost as laborious as that of any loftier Swiss or other mountain I ever ascended. It was almost like an elonga- ted scorified cone of Vesuvius. The sun, too, was devour- ingly hot, but as we gained by hard and panting exertion, in 132 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. which the dark face of my old soldier guide grew darker, higher and higher points of elevation in the transparent heaven of Greece, and at last after some two hours from leaving our companions, conquered the soaring peak — -all weariness vanished " like a dream when one awaketh," at a hitherto self-denied glance of the panorama, stretched as if in infinite lines of vividest light below us. I felt upon me, in truth, an inspiration. I was on the throne of the king of the lyre — song was in my heart, and I grasped for the lyre, but its tortoise shell and golden chords, were but the streaming dazzling beams of the noonday sun ! On the high point which we had attained, we looked directly off the back of Parnassus, as off a broken angle of the world — a tremendous precipice sheer and awful from the diminished Lycorean plain, unlike the more slanting iEtolian side of the mountain, up which we had clambered. Instead of two peaks, I saw that Parnassus had claims to five or six — Parnassus being only one of the Pindus chain, which embraces also Helicon and Cithaeron, and runs even to the extremity of the Attic Cape. Indeed, the one grand impression of the land of Greece from any commanding summit like Parnassus, is that of its dark, corrugated, mountainous character. In every direction swell the black humps of the higher peaks, woven together by numberless ramifications of lower ridges, leaving no great area unintersected. The whole of Greece proper is a knotty conglomeration of mountain systems, orossing and interlocking, and thus forming skyey walls around little territories, making those haughty little states of old, PARNASSUS. 133 and as effectually separating them as if seas rolled be- tween. A second almost equally strong impression of the land, is its greatly irregular ocean-coast, its singular deep indentations, where the narrow sea lies in the very arms of the land, thus openiDg a vast surface of coast for so small a country. This has often been noticed in its re- lation to the formative influences upon the antique Hel- lenic character, giving that nation the fluent, progressive, energic stamp of a people maritime by the decree of na- ture. Toward the north of us, clear in the brilliant opal atmosphere, lay the purple mountains of Thessaly, with majestic old Olympus — iroAvSelpas, aydwupos, elvocrupvAAos 'OhvfAiros, and the interval or bay in the mountains where was Thermopylae ; on the north-west, the oceanlike Alps of Epirus ; on the north-east, the island of Euboea, and the strip-like silver of the intervening sea ; towards the south- east, the more indistinct iEgean, and the land of Attica ; on the south, the mountains of Peloponnesus, culminating in the distant Taygetus ; the blue gulf of Cornith glitter- ing immediately below ; Mount Helicon near at hand ; and far away toward the south-east, the hazy Ionian sea, and the eye almost strained to catch the lone galley of Ulysses sailing that dim ocean. This is the noblest prospect in all the land of Greece, because Parnassus stands in the very centre of the land, and is the highest summit except- ing Olympus. Here, with the easy conquest of a glance, one holds the entire earth, whose name has been enough 134 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. to wake the world when it grows slavish, sensual, stupid ; whose arts have begotten art ; whose sons' blood sublimed the battle field before the celestial battles of Peace were known ; whose literature wraps a germ of immortality, and whose transparent tongue was thought by the Spirit of God worthy to be the medium of illumination from God to man. And the superior intellectual world still lives in and through Greece ; and in Divine wisdom this rocky peninsula was intended to play its ineffaceable part in the mental history of our race, and. a brighter, broader, and more pregnant glance of God's eye fell upon, and quickened these sea-washed rocks, and from them sprung keen and winged spirits, which now reign in all the intel- ligent affairs of men, at the hearth, the school, the study, the desk, the tribune, the senate, making Greece still the ideal intellectual centre of the world (as Delphi was the physical, where met the wide-winged eagles of Zeus flown in different directions from heaven), to which as the true and absolute standard, all works purely artistic, or which are the expressions of the pure thought-power, the art of evolving the true, must be brought, which is the final home of the worker in pure thought, so that as well as Eschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Pericles, also Milton, Schiller, Leibnitz, Webster, are real Grecians. But the splendor and joys of the actual light of the scene was not long allowed to me a barbarian, for a valley-born cloud whirled up the sides of the mountain, and with its misty brush dashed out the glorious land of Hesiod, Leonidas and Demosthenes, whose mountains rise also upon spirit- PARNASSUS. 135 ual plains, that cannot be dimmed ; and I descended the veiled throne of Song in carefulness and in fog, having neither become an inspired poet, nor mad. 1 1 With the ancients, an ascent of Mount Parnassus, involved one of these consequences. %\}t felt ItaL THE GKREEK IDEAL. When a few days after the ascent of Parnassus, I saw the sun kindling its morning fires on the magnificent altar- crag of Acrocorinthus, and walked around the thin skele- ton of the ancient stadium of Corinth — from which the Apostle Paul drew those strenuous metaphors, " We are made a spectacle (a theatre) unto the world, and to angels, and to men," — " Know ye not that they which run in a race (in the stadium) run all, but one receiveth the prize? — And every man that striveth for the mastery is temper- ate in all things 1 Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible," — I felt that here, where Paul had lived a year and a half, and looked upon this same impressive nature, as he went forth daily from the low tent-maker's roof to call the dreamy crowds of the wor- shippers of mountain gods and concrete passions, to recog- nise the one spiritual Grod in the sublime works of his hands ; doubtless using that noble argument penned in Corinth, u For the invisible things of him from the crea- tion of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and God- 140 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. head, so that they are without excuse," — that here, even the poetic light of Greece faded ; and here, great Parnas- sus sunk and vanished away. Here was a spot where the false and true encountered and stood over against each other in simultaneous and very strong contrast, — the old Naturalism, the quick offspring of doubt, which was the child of sin, and born just without the gate of Eden, — the fear of the power of nature, the determination to dis- believe all but the near, visible, physical, empirical, and to worship nature (or the created world), as containing within itself the original energy, the normal idea, as evolv- ing all things, as divine, — the fallen pantheism of the God-forsaken soul and imagination, whether lighting the hill-top idolatry of Assyrian Baal, or kindling the uni- versal fire of Persia, 1 or glooming in the mighty temples of Egypt or India, or playing and flashing in the more beautiful muse and splendid art of the Greeks, — this, in its imbecile, human, and even impure character, stood in Corinth, opposed to the piercing earnestness, spiritual purity, deep joyfulness. ineffable love, and divine stamp and image of the religion of Jesus Christ. The epistle of the inspired tent-maker to this little church at Corinth, which I read near by those three granite columns of the only standing temple, whose very name is lost, exhaled a deeper fulness of the divine life than ever before. The spirit-breathed exhortations to unity, humility, love, dis- 1 Herodotus. Clio. B. I. Layard's researches also lead us to suppose that the Persians pantheized more generally and largely than all the other mythologists. THE GREEK IDEAL. 141 trust in mere human wisdom, the spiritual mind, to bring- ing every thought to the obedience of Christ, to striving after an incorruptible crown — the sublime announcements of the resurrection of the dead, the inconceivable triumph, the moral perfection, the holy and bright eternity, — what " foolishness to the Greek," who trembled before the cloudy voice of Delphi, in which darkness rather than light was chosen, who gloried in strife, clashing philoso- phies, human wisdom for its own sake, the delights of the senses served by the skilful enslaved reason, earthly hon- ors and oaken crowns, and in fierce contempt of other men ; who suffered his own poets to create his theology, 1 and who held the present life to be the real, the life to come the unreal. We speak of and admire the religion of the ancient Greeks, as we would discourse of and admire a beautiful work of art ; we philosophize upon the origin of the myths, and draw them forth from that deep fount of human religions, the naturalistic tendency in the mind in all ages, or the blind, groping desire to find God in the outer world having lost him in the inner soul, reason, heart, modified among the Greeks only by the more deli" cate, as well as more fervid conceptive personifying power of this intellectual race ; nor do we scruple to admire, nor do we fear to yield ourselves wholly to the power of the Hellenic genius ; nor do we hesitate to mount the rapid chariot of old Homer, not asking whether those great forms who led "The Trojan dance of war," 1 Herodotus. Clio. 142 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. lit up by his touch of fire, were real or no ; nor do we shrink from entering the irrevocable iron portals of the sounding, desolate, and grand moral fane of iEschylus, for the Greek myth is dead, and it has no inherent power over the soul, although the poet may call it back, and the theo- philanthropist may revive its graceful flower-rites, and its beautiful idea may be set in exquisite light and shade by the genius of Goethe, or coldly idolized again by Hume, or eloquently re-deified by the modern votary of nature without God and as God, or as if God were not " above na- ture, before nature, and the author of nature." Though the Grecian myth is dead, its fount still lives in the hu- man mind, and sends up its puny waters even under the golden sun of a Christian revelation of the true and spirit- ual God. Sad is it that the very pure loveliness of God's natural works manifesting Him, should tempt to His ob- scuration ; should minister to that philosophy which, with- out spiritual awe, beholds in nature, and in man as merely natural, the whole God ; which thus converses with the Infinite without humility ; which sees a heart-cleansing faith in a landscape or a wheat-field. This philosophy turns aside the true currents of nature, and stagnates them on the earth ; whereas, they should run on to a deeper and spiritual faith, and make even that faith sweeter, for when the mind once becomes pure and holy, nature un- folds to it mysteries, as when a lake grows perfectly still, the most delicate and lofty heavens shine in it. Nature has been truly called ;: God's art," and all the expressions of divine ideas are worthy our reverent loving study, and THE GREEK IDEAL. 143 that study will always refresh and purify our spirits. Nature draws to better and simpler tastes, and he has something wrong in him, who cannot enjoy and be in- spired by her. It is only, as has been hinted, when our evil desires are laid to rest, and our fevered hearts pulse tranquilly, and when we are at real peace with God, that nature yields to us her most exquisite delights, and then a simple solitary walk in the sunshine, or under the bless- ing palms of stately trees with the still air around like the courts above, is quite enough to make a good man heavenly-minded. To sit in the summer woods on an old decayed tree-trunk and muse, is pleasure enough to him who loves G-od, and all the works that He has made. The yellow butterflies that tremble around him in their brief life-ecstasies, are types of his own mortality. The bees drive impetuously into the thistle-flowers, gold-hunters spending their thewy strength for burdensome riches. Clinging to the old trunk are the cast-off shells and larvae of bright insects, perhaps even now glancing in the sun, — death and a higher life ! Along comes the stately meas- uring-worm with his regular advances, like the wise man who looks before he takes a step ; and the fiery wasp that at last drives him away, is the little care which stings and troubles more than the great affliction, slowly crush- ing. Thus nature draws our cares from us with her gentle wiles, and pours peace into our minds like a cooling wave, and throws around Religion a sister arm, helping her faint feet along the road ; but had not the trembling hope of a deeper peace and a holier joy dawned upon our soul, 144 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. nature itself were vain and superficial to give us this high hope and pure joy. Jonathan Edwards, rude as he was in his Connecticut forests in the finer studies of nature and art, found himself melted to tears by the sight of a little pure white flower growing on the banks of the river. But the stainless heavens themselves, are not enough to brighten and cleanse the wicked heart ; and the great mountains which touch the cope of the sky like thoughts of heavenly might, and the valleys sunk between like humble, sweet, and contrite feelings, will not create those holy resolves, nor lead to that real repentance. The bars of flaming ruby and gold, which close the portals of even- ing, though they may have shut in the soul to wonder and dreams, never yet barred out beautiful temptation to the unrenewed mind, nor shut it up to the wonderful simpli- city of Faith. Nature cannot satisfy Faith. Nature may reveal her utmost depths, but still the great cry of Bil- dad the Shuhite goes up from the abyss of man's spirit — " How then can man be justified with God ? Behold even to the moon and it shineth not; Yea, the stars are not pure in his sight. How much less man." The susceptibility to beauty and grandeur, God-im- planted though it be, is yet essentially different from the religious susceptibility, the conscience, the will, the spirit, " the inner man " of the Holy Spirit's renovation. Spirit is different from nature, even as God is essentially and infinitely distinct from the finite nature which he has made. He inspires this nature, but he is not mingled in THE GREEK IDEAL. 145 it. The natural in the Scriptures is no less philosophi- cally than clearly distinguished from the spiritual. Reli- gion needs a deeper foundation and a higher impulse than nature, God-radiant, pure, powerful, refining though it be. "Would the Christian religion with its surpassing appeal to the susceptibility of beauty and grandeur in the mind, ever be admired like the naturalistic Grecian myth as a thing of mere beauty, or of idealized nature or art, should the wisdom of man see fit to pass it over and reject it ? I even conjecture that it would be cursed sooner than eulogized, that notwithstanding its heavenly sublimity and divine grace, it would be carefully unmolested, scrupulously unmentioned, its Faith sealed with the royal seal, and its Book drowned "Deeper than did ever plummet sound," lest the very whisper of its name should start it again into life, and its strong embrace fall a second time upon the conscience, and drag it like a criminal into the daylight of reason and before the judgment-seat of God. Nature will grow deeper in the loving reverence and profound study of man as the true manifestation of God, and science will become more religious and vitalized with faith ; but why continually re-enact the old Greek tragedy of the idolatry of the natural. It can never probably be more beautifully dramatized than by the Greek mind, for the moral difference recognized, the gulf between the human and the divine seen, it is marvellous how the genius of this far the greatest people of antiquity — the Romans by 146 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. no means excepted — sublimed and vitalized their idea of religion. The State erected itself into strength through the mutual amphyctionic councils of religion. The sacred pan- hellenic games bound all Greece together in a golden moral bond, where healthy deeds were stimulated and the mus- cle was swelled to its perfect proportion until Phidias had his model, where reverence to law was encouraged, as no law-breaker could stand in the arena, and where the strife of mind, keener and nobler than that of the stadium, bore up an entire people on beating, struggling wings, and great ideals of thought and action passed before the eye of the whole nation. The poet, nature's priest, making religion the ali- ment of his thought, the hidden fire of his enthusiasm, in- sensibly clothed the created forms of nature with a kind of aesthetic divinity, so that they rose from the law of mental weakness, and seemed and moved like gods, hardly know- ing that Parnassus and Olympus made the gods whom they throned. The artist agonizing to draw out from the mystery of nature her sacred powers, penetrated thus into her most concealed laws, and really grasped the ideal, the pure original idea in the form, — so that the Greek artist has never been equalled, so that the modern sculptor, Canova himself, vainly strives even to imitate — so that although modern artists measure the proportions of Greek temples, and construct exact models and formulas from them, they never rise to that exquisite adaptation of na- ture, place, and idea, that made one Greek edifice to differ from every other — so that in the most marred and diminu- tive structure, even that little choragic monument of THE GREEK IDEAL. 147 Lysicrates, which lifts its beauteous head out of the coarse and heavy ruins of the Franciscan Convent at Athens beams with an unquenched light and harmony of the Greek conception, and this is seen consummated in the Parthe- non that speaks to the mind even more than the eye, prov- ing that its builder felt its idea, and appealed to the subjective in the beholder, ever the sublimest appeal. Viewing it a few days after my visit to Corinth, I was wonderfully impressed with its power of exciting the emotion of grandeur, while comparatively so small in size. It is a purely ideal grandeur. Really nothing as it is, compared with the vastness of Egyptian and Roman structures, it is yet like an eternal edifice, with every part entirely sustained, even as its intellectual parallel, the Oration on the Crown, both of them the pure expression of strong, condensed and finished mind ; and sadly broken as it is, prophetic of speedy ruin, with the great gap in the centre of it, and the pediment swaying down between the aged columns with grievous cracks, it yet appears perfect, for the beholder builds it again with its own kindling inspiration. That well-known antique bust of Demosthenes, in its Greek countenance, and its unconscious idealization of nature, the intense, even painful thought of the brow, mingled with the serene, almost childlike expression of the eyes and the rest of the features, finely expresses the mingled simplicity and power of the Greek genius. And where is there in all art, before or since, the instinctive nature, the vitalizing idea, the hazardous conception, 148 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. that lives in the pain of the Laocoon ! The reach and strain of that old man, from the hand that grasps and bends the serpent in the air, to the opposite foot which in its convulsive agony grasps the ground, brings in play every great action of the human frame. The dreadful fangs fasten on the body, just where a bite lets out the soul. The forehead of Laocoon, ribbed with anguish, the speechless mouth speaking a thousand groans, are of a father perishing with his children, of a patriot expiring with his falling country, overwhelmed by that very sover- eignty of mind which lifted him to the lonely throne of the celestial anger. He who has seen that sublime old man, may almost bear all agony himself. Modern art is cold, powerless, dead, compared with these bold and mighty Singings of ideal life and action into the marble. How repose, instead of action, can be insisted upon as the great charac- teristic of Greek art, I know not. Even in the repose of the stillest attitude, there is ever the action of a living nature, sentiment, idea. And why should Pagan art thus have produced in the Apollo of Delphi, copied in the Apollo of the Vatican. 1 the Ideal man ? This can only be solved by supposing that the soul, though darkened by false religion, has never been without some conception of its ideal or perfect self, some haunting memory of its divine origin and image, some desire and struggle to em- body this idea, and it fell upon the sculptor of the Apollo to unite this conception with the most perfect skill sub- 1 Canova's opinion. THE GREEK IDEAL. 149 limed by a religious emotion. And in Art, the religious ideal of the Hellenic genius, combining and heightening the natural, reached its most clustering successful fruit and form, but not its greatest strife and agony. The Greek Philosophy is still the great type of the painfully inworking Ideal Philosophy. Plato is still its master, whatever may be its new forms of discovering the fundamental laws of being and of all things in that interior consciousness of the mind itself, in which all objects created or uncreated are viewed. The Greeks are the originals, the real teachers of the deep-musing philosophers of Germany ; who have opened imperial chambers in the palace of mind, the cham- bers of the Ideal, but who have accompanied their magni- ficent discoveries in some eminent instances with a vanity and deifying of man, destructive of humility and religion, and with a vague pantheism, or a " contemplation of God merely as Nature and Thought," and not as conscious Spirit and personal Being, more profoundly culpable than the Greek pantheism, because committed against the light. It is related of Socrates, that the breath of the great oracle of Delphi had gone forth declaring him to be, in the face of the world, the wisest of men. Though stag- gered at this announcement, he could not dispute the god, for he was a devout man ; but he immediately commenced to test the oracle. Every man whom he met, who had the reputation of wisdom of any kind, he drew from him by wary and searching questions, the amount and limit of his wisdom, thus soon satisfying himself of the shallowness of human wisdom. In this manner the scrutinizing 150 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. ' elenchus ' grew up into the Socratic system ; and would not Socrates, the most nobly and disinterestedly practical of all speculatists, who directly or indirectly would work out for his fellow-men the problem of human happiness, who questioned in order to approach the real, who confuted in order to gain the juster conclusion, who sifted and sepa- rated only to press toward the surer result, and who actually came nearest of all unenlightened mind, before or since, to the truth of Divine Revelation, that " the wis- dom of men is foolishness with God," and that therefore even in the most bitter self-knowledge there is the only humble beginning of wisdom, — would not this Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks who were the wisest of the heathen, the greater teacher of great Plato, the father of phi- losophy, " plank from the wreck of paradise," crown of the natural, who died sayiug, that he hoped the good would happily exist again, but he knew not. — would not at least this wise man, who was groping in the night be- fore the dawn, have hailed with joy unspeakable the rising of the sun, Him, who " was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world," in whom " life and immortality were brought to light," who revealed God, the Father, and would not Socrates have run in breathless haste, and cast himself like a weary child at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ ! Those in the past who would have believed on Christ had they known Him. and those who would be- lieve did they know Him, are they not and will they not, through Him, come to His blessed presence and society above. 1 ATHENS. In order to win a faint idea of Athens, let us place our- selves for a few moments upon the broken pediment of the Parthenon, and throw a rapid glance abroad and around us. We are seated upon an upcurled isolated crag to- ward the southern extremity of a great plain, the plain of Athens, and the largest of Attica. We are upon the rock of the Acropolis, the central point of the interest historic, intellectual, moral, of Athens ; upon whose uplifted circumscribed oval stood the original cities of Cecrops and Theseus ; which formed the nucleus and citadel of all the succeeding cities ; and when Athens reached its highest splendor in the days of Cimon and Pericles, it became the platform of the most ethereal temples of religion which the human mind ever conceived. Whatever lies at the base of the Acropolis is of less in- controvertible interest, yet we are not compelled to grope around upon a monotonous plain, as at Nineveh and Baby- lon, in order to search for the site of a vanished city, but here rests the singular and enduring rock called 8 154 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. " Cecropia," called " Aster " the Eye, called " Athense," identified by the swelling testimony of ages, and deserving the enthusiasm of an ancient Greek, when he says, " The situation of the Acropolis and the loveliness of its surround- ing atmosphere are admirable ; for while the atmosphere of all Attica has this character, that especially which hangs over the citadel, is the fairest and most pure, so that you might recognize that spot at a distance by the crown of light that encircles it." The large plain of Athens beneath us runs up narrowing even to the base of Mount Parnes on the north, and is shut in by the nearer Mount Pentelicus on the north-east, whose chain almost locks in with that of Mount Hymettus, and forms the eastern wall of the plain, which on the south and south- west continues unobstructedly to the blue iEgean and the Gulf of Salamis. In so mountain-locked a land as Greece, this noble plain seems as if created for the Greek mind to breathe more freely, to expand, and to flow forth in those Attic works that time has not made old. Barren now, the streaks of silvery olive groves over it, lineal de- scendants of Pallas' groves, somewhat relieve its brown- tinted desolation. But let us sweep around us a more limited circle. On the north, nearer the suburbs of the city, are the thick luxuriant gardens that still mantle the site of the old gar- dens of the Academy, in the shallow vale of the Cephis- sus, through which ran the commencement of the Sacred Way ; over against these gardens to the north-east is the conical crag of Mount Lycabettus challenging the Aero- ATHENS. 155 polis ; almost immediately at the base of this rock, stands the modern enormous white marble cube of King Otho's palace, barbarian though Pentelican, and a little to the south of this, on the smooth, clean plain, rise the sixteen pure columns of the temple of Olympian Zeus, trembling with their tall fruity tops over the dry bed of the shrunken Ilissus. In a recent tempest, one of these im- perial columns, in spite of its Roman will that had held it up slenderly alone through storm and time, was cast down. These white pillars have for their background the shadowy and not very distant mountain of Hymettus, cooling the fevered plain with its dark bulk. Following around to the south-west and west, the same imaginary line which we have pursued, but bending more closely in to the Acropolis, we have the low rocky swells of ground among which lie the sites of the Museum, the Pnyx, un- doubtedly the Bema of Demosthenes, where he laid bare with his pitiless sarcasm the heart of Philip, and sum- moned the ancestral shades of Athenian valor to close around and sustain his sinking country, the still almost perfect little temple of Theseus, and upon the precise area of the present city, the site of the whole ancient city, " )ftova IlaAAaSos," stretching rather to the north and north-east with its double walls, temples, altars, agoras, theatres, gardens, straight stately streets, triumphal arches, choragic monu- ments and innumerable statues, all diademed by the au- gust and unwasted dream of Phidias, lifted high above on 156 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. the rock in the transparent, delicate, glowing sky of Greece, a vision of perfect and glorious beauty such as blind Milton saw in his mind, and the Apostle Paul actually beheld ! We have not yet noticed in our eye-sweep one little rock or hill just beneath us, close in at the northern base of the Acropolis, now rough and bare and hardly weed- grown, which must once have stood in the very core of these splendors — the rock of the Areopagus. But let us first descend from the Arcopolis and walk to the site of the ancient agora or market-place of Athens, a short dis- tance to the north-east of the hill of the Areopagus. This is also the modern market-place and general assembly of Athens, and here now, as of old, the stock brokers of in- telligence gather, to gratify that spirit of speculation which was once the too-finely spun spirit of what was truly great, free, and superior in the Athenian character. Here sat the philosophers and discussed the last phase of the metaphysical kaleidescope of the academy. Here that barefooted, rough-clad questioner sat, and plucked the feathers from many a vain bird strutting in the broad sunshine of his own goodness and wisdom, now calling forth hearty shouts of laughter from the common people, and now paling the fieriest youth with his hints of things deeper than the schools, and his sudden, broadcast seeds of im- mortality. Here the Answerer who had seen " face to face," and to whom had been " revealed the things which were hidden from the foundation of the world," sat, and ' : disputed in the market-place daily with them that met him." Now on his second missionary tour from Antioch, ATHENS. 157 having swept through Asia Minor like a fire, crossed into Europe, preached the Gospel in Macedonia, been shaken out from prison at Philippi by an earthquake of God, and driven by persecution for preaching " the word of God" from Thessalonica and from Berea, Paul had come to Athens. A higher power had surely led him thither, for it would seem as if he himself had come to Athens merely to wait for his companions Silas and Timotheus, in order to pursue again their journey together. But while there, as his lone Christian walks carried him from place to place, from marble temple to temple, from flower-garland- ed altar to altar, from shady grove to grove gleaming with statues of " gods many," and he noticed the processions, altar fires, crownings and clothings of the images, and burn- ings of incense to statues so matchless in beauty that a Christian world now almost worships them, his spirit was stirred within him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry (the fulness of idols). The imprisonments, pursuits, escapes of death, which he had just struggled through, could not repress that fire in his soul. He must preach Jesus Christ also in Athens. His first most natural channel was among the Jews. From them he passed to the seats of the philosophers, teachers and talkers in the painted stoa of the market- place, and " daily " as a philosopher solemnly in earnest, he proclaimed and discussed a divine and spiritual reli- gion, brought and wrought through the Lord Jesus Christ. The more contemplative and rational stoics lis- tened as to some new foreign religious development j the 158 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. more superficial epicureans, abhorrent of any thing earnest, called him a picker up of religious notions ; but the result was that he was invited to withdraw from the republican tumult of the agora, in order to explain himself more fully in the quiet of the neighboring hill of the Areopagus. This very circumstance is sufficient, it seems to me, to prove that Paul's words had made some impression even upon the brilliant, loose Athenian heart. Something has touched the quick nerve of conscience under the fat coils of easy pleasure, and the hard folds of irresponsible pantheism. Philosophy was now for a moment to sit at the feet of Chris- tianity, where at last charmed she shall always sit, a sublime handmaid and helper, her face more and more beau- tiful, as the beautiful face of one new born through grace. Slowly with the interested crowd, Paul ascends the slope and the sixteen high steps cut in the rock of Mars' Hill, to the small area on its top, where was the stone seat of the council of the Areopagus. That three-sided stone seat still remains and some of the steps. This was the spot, if there was any in Athens, consecrated to serious things, to solemn recollections, to trials of life and death, and to the grave deliberations of the supreme court of Athens. Here in former sterner days the judges heard causes and pronounced sentence by night, .lest they should be partial through their eyes, and the gigantic crimes of murder, blasphemy and impiety were arraigned before them. But Paul stood there as a preacher of the Grospel. We do not call Paul's address on Mars' Hill an oration, ATHENS. 159 as it is sometimes termed, built upon the rules of art, and in imitation or rivalry of Grecian eloquence ; but it was the wise and sublime preaching of an apostle of Jesus Christ, adapting his speech to the place and assembly, and introducing his grand theme with an inspired reason and the craft of love. It was such preaching as every minis- ter of Christ may study to emulate, to feel the pulse of his audience with a calm hand, and to present " the truth as it is in Jesus " in a manner fitted to gain the keenest entrance in its heart. Now. when at length he found his position a commanding one. when Athens had fixed her bright, questioning eye full upon him, he gives himself to a sustained flow of majestic and solemn speech, that these rocks and that Pnyx hard by had never heard before, and of which the brief outline in the book of Acts conveys a living idea. He seizes the magnificent advantages of the position to which the philosophers and people had un- consciously led him. They gave him the argument and he uses it. They led him to the heart of their splendid idolatry, and then beneath the very shadow of the Par- thenon, with a flash of inspiration, he tells them of the eternal " temple not made with hands," and of a God, too spiritual, too awful, too holy to be imaged or conceived by the human mind. In love and wisdom he freely ac- knowledges the original religious impulse that being per- verted had led them to this very idolatry, and had peopled this white marbled crag above him, and this great city beneath him, having more statues than inhabitants, with gods of "gold and stone." 160 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. By this graceful yielding of all that was good in his hearers to them, he led them on with him to a true view of the divine nature, in the pure reflex light of which their own idolatry would appear sinful, deformed, abhorred. He takes advantage of their acknowledged ignorance of the Divine nature in the midst of their proud intellectual- ity, and turning the recorded, indisputable confession of ignorance engraved upon one of their own altars gently but clearly upon them, he proceeds to tell them of that " unknown" Godhead. He could tell them they were as sinful and ignorant children before him. In the simple contact here of Paul with the disciples of Plato and the elder and greater philosophers, in the eye of the world's highest illumination and most burnished spiritual culture, we see the immeasurable superiority of a mind taught by the divine religion of Jesus Christ. In its spiritual point of view that mind rose above the minds of the philosophers who heard him, as far as his eternal temple above that temple of Pallas. The simple contrast here is an unan- swerable argument for the revealed character of the Chris- tian religion. How was Paul with all his powers, though the greatest man of his times, so unsearchably superior to the minds that had taught in Athens, and had reasoned upon the Divine and human natures now for centu- ries 7 The explanation is only to be found, with reverence, in a greater than Paul, who united the human with the di- vine mind, and thus poured the light of G-od upon the feeble darkness of the grandest human mind. And of ATHENS. 161 Him, now Paul begins to speak, and of that system of Faith in Him and peculiar to Him, of whose mysteries natural religion, or the simple reason, never caught the faintest gleam. The great peculiar doctrines of the Gos- pel will be found touched upon in this matchless preach- ing of Christ, by the Apostle of k the Gentiles on Mars' Hill, as if this were his own most splendid pulpit of the Gentiles. But this preaching of Christ, " to the Greeks foolishness," was not long to be borne. Partly in scorn, and partly in respect, the audience interrupt the preach- ing of life and salvation. They descend from low Mars' Hill, which had been to them higher than the Acropolis, higher than Olympus, in its heavenly momentary light, splendor, grace, and favor, some to mock, some to reason, and some few to believe. One cannot help following in thought the life of that undoubtedly cultured Dionysius the Areopagite, after he had abandoned all for the cross of Christ. His future personality in Athens haunts the imagination. What trials of his new love did he not encounter 1 What questioning shades of antique wisdom did he not meet at every corner, in the city of Plato and Aristotle 1 Did he in old age sink sweetly to sleep in Jesus, or did he quickly rush to meet the Greek sword, or Roman axe ? What kind of a man was he ? Was he daring or shrinking ? Was he a Christian Nicias or Themistocles 1 Did he bring any other of the wise Athenians into the knowledge of the Son of God? Did all the beauty of the old religion of the 8» 162 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. sea, woods and mountains, of Homer, Euripides, and Phi- dias, never sometimes shake him % Did he keep his robes white and undenled from the stains of false philosophies, nor ever move away from the simple hope of the Gos- pel? %ty IWigimt at Islam. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. There is a sense of the nearness of God on the desert, more than on the ocean, which can only be experienced in perfect stillness, which is yet the silence of nature. With the soundless foot of the camel, one seems to be ever com- ing nearer and nearer, step by step, into the presence and unto the throne of the Infinite One. At night when the moon, wonderfully enlarged in size and light, looms up without another object to break its vast shield from be- hind the low sand hills, and the far-stretching billows of the sandy ocean are glistening as Peruvian silver, to go away from the tents, and to be alone, is to come very nigh God's awful majesty. The impenetrable bright depths of the desert firmament look down on you, the solitary speck on the lifeless sand, and He who " covereth himself with light as with a garment " must be also regarding his crea- ture there. Easily could Moses thus go away from the tents of Israel, and be alone with the Grod of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. Nothing then broke upon his thoughts of " the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eter- nity." The sand-hills sweeping around him in semicircu- 106 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. lar ridges, or piling up into pyramids, or ploughing down into long cavernous valleys where the shadows accumulate and blacken, were at best but monotonous objects, and the eternal sky above lifted the gaze of the soul to profound contemplations of God. The desert is the birthplace of religious meditation and enthusiasm, whether false or true. The Pentateuch has the desert strongly in it, and it is tracked with the forty years wandering in the desert, not only in the solemn monotony of its imagery, and the depth of its conceptions of God, but in its wilderness fire, and in the intensity of its religious enthusiasm. Even let a few sentences from the last sublime words of the lawgiver of Israel be remembered : "And this is the blessiug wherewith Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death." And he said : The Lord came from Sinai, And rose up from Seir unto them; He sinned forth from mount Paran, And he came with ten thousands of saints ; From his right hand went a fiery law for them. And of Joseph he said : Blessed of the Lord be his land, — And for the precious fruits brought forth by the sun, And for the precious things brought forth by the moon, And for the chief things of the ancient mountains, And of the precious things of the lasting hills. And of Zebulon he said : Rejoice, Zebulon, in thy going out ; And Issachar, in thy tents. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 107 And of Gad lie said : Blessed is he that enlargeth Gad: He dwelleth as a lion. And of Aslier lie said : There is none like nnto the God of Jeshurun, Who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, And in his excellency on the sky. The eternal God is thy refuge, And underneath are the everlasting arms. Thus also in the character of Abraham and of Job, is exhibited a faith not in essence, but in feature, rather of an oriental, or more strictly Arabian than universal type, which, nourished in awe, quietude, and contemplation, is usually passive, but when it acts, acts with terrible ener- gy. More than once it has been observed that oriental religious thought, nursed in the still burning desert and unguided by divine inspiration, has issued forth in the most fierce and destroying fanaticism. The bosom of the silent desert was the birthplace of tremendous Islamism. 1 The young camel-driver of the desert, Mohammed, of a priestly stock and claiming descent from Abraham him- self, was without doubt of a highly religiously emotive, or at least imaginative temperament. 2 We do not suppose, 1 Islamism is an older name than Mohammedanism. "Islam" signifies primarily entire devotion to another's will, especially that of God, and thereby the attainment of peace. Its relation to the Hebrew word "salem " is evident. It stands in a secondary sense for all the tenets, doctrinal and practical, of the Mohammedan reli- gion. From it are derived the terms " moslem " and " mussulman." 2 The Koreish tribe from which Mohammed sprung, had a mix- ture of a Jewish blood direct, it is said, from Ishmael. 168 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. at the present day, that original, strong disgust at the idolatry of his nation and desire to introduce a better faith, is denied to Mohammed. His countrymen were partly of the elder Arabian or Sabaean, and partly of the Magian idolatries, with, however, dim recollections still haunting them of an ancient Abrahamic patriarchal faith, pervading, indeed, all the false religions of the East, even those of India and China, thereby proving a streaming forth of primitive mind East and West, from about the region of Mesopotamia, or perhaps a point still further to the East, and nearer the heart of Asia. 1 To restore this ancient Arabian Abrahamic faith in one God, was always Mohammed's profession. He seems early to have been drawn to such contemplations, as in his camel-drivings over the desert, and visits as a factor to Syrian and Egyp- tian towns, he eagerly sought out the traditions of older times, and sacred localities, and informed himself at least of the outside views and practices of Judaism and Chris- tianity, receiving, there is good reason to believe, much attention and many hints from Christians, and especially from a monk named Sergius, whom he met in Syria, and who afterwards resided in Mecca. 2 Indeed, Arabia 1 Abraham stood with divining arrows in his hand as a stone idol in the ante-Mohammedan Caaba of Mecca. Bib. Sac. Vol. IX. No. 34. p. 257. 2 Carlyle says : " I know not what to make of that ' Sergius^ the Nestorian monk ; ' probably enough of it is greatly exaggerated, this of the Nestorian monk." There is no need of making much of "Sergius;" thi9 was already the seventh century of the Christian roligion. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 1G9 at that time contained as resident citizens, large num- bers of Christians, chiefly schismatics, as well as multi- tudes of Jews. The Nestorian instructors of Mohammed, particularly opposed to Greek and Latin superstitions and virtual idolatry, strengthened his bias to a simple Abra- hamic belief in one spiritual God. The mind of Mohammed revolved this thought until he was forty years old, when he proclaimed it as an inspi- ration from heaven. We should not be entirely unwilling to suppose that Mohammed, up to this time, was laboring under a mental enthusiasm, arising from the conception of so great an idea, which amounted perhaps to a belief in a species of inspiration. But the bold impiety which thus early, as a ground-creed, ever linked with the sublime and pure truth of "one God," the corollary that " Mohammed was the prophet of God," militates against this view. And when opportunity came to Mohammed, developing according to an oriental proverb, the love of power which is latent like a closed flower-bud in every man's breast, the zeal of a spiritual reformer gave way. He hesitated not to grasp the sword when fortuitously extended to him. And this is somewhat a key to his character, which was an impul- sive one, following rather than compelling circumstances ; now strongly guided to higher objects, and now, when the temptation came, seizing it for selfish ends. When tempt- ed to sensuality, his luxuriousness was a hard struggle with his sanctity, and it required all his prophetic casuis- try to cover the breaches made in his sacred character. So his Bedouin predatory disposition, impossible to be 170 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. resisted, called for hot-sped sanctions from heaven, bring- ing in the timely god to help him out of his dilemmas. We regard Mohammed, about whom there have been so many opinions, as a man of extraordinary genius, de- cidedly the most so of his rather mediocre age ; a genius, humanly speaking, equal to the vast effects which have sprung from its energic character. He who leads out his nation from gross idolatry to the knowledge of one spirit- ual God, deserves the praise of it ; and here he was great, showing lofty intelligence, and a sublime religious appre- ciation. Had he not proved false to that God whom he taught to idolaters ; nor made a great truth which his penetration had fastened upon, the instrument of unhallow- ed ends ; had he not deliberately assumed the awful crown of a prophet with its involved consequences ; had he not shown that he possessed no true conception of the moral and spiritual character of God, all his conduct, life and name would have been perfumed with the odor of goodness and greatness. His nature from the hand of God was probably generous and large, and his mind acute, imaginative and suggestive ; his gentleness, love of chil- dren, eloquence, and personal dignity, are dwelt upon with ecstasy by his Arabian biographers ; light, they say, beamed from his forehead, fragrance wafted from his body, his form cast no shadow, and a grateful cloud overhung his desert steps. 1 Politically, he manifested sagacity and force, laboring for national union, and stamping, with the powerful tread of his sandal, the thousand discordant 1 Merrick's sheeah traditions of the Hyat-Ul- uloob. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 171 tribes of Arabia into one. But the dark sides of his na- ture are equally strong, and his own book, the Koran, is a standing witness against him, and would be in itself fatal to his sacred pretensions. One of the chapters is expressly to reveal the indulgence of heaven to its favorite prophet, for an act of incest, according to Arabian law. That there were great and elemental strifes in his soul between good and bad, we doubt not ; for with extreme cunning he was still a fanatic, or perhaps better, an enthusiast ; a lustful, blood-stained man, a genuine Arab, he was never- theless one of lofty native power, and of the precise type of oriental greatness ; an unscrupulous zealot, he was yet no imbecile, and must have possessed some splendid traits of character to have excited the love and veneration with which he has been regarded by millions for twelve centu- ries. 1 To one visiting the East, the vast influence of Mohammed, throwing its colossal shadow upon eternity, cannot but be felt ; and a desire will be inevitably excited in any philosophic or religious mind, to inquire into the sources of this power ; and while doing this, there is no fear of disturbing truth, unless, indeed, truth be wantonly disregarded. 2 1 Ryan. 2 The modern French writers, in speaking of Mohammedanism, seem to lay aside Christian discrimination and conscience. Indeed, to read a sentence like the following, we lose every boundary of truth, and embark on a sea of all irreverence and unbelief: "La mission de Mahomet, revelation feconde qui illumine la Mecque au contact de Jerusalem et du Sina\" — M. Barrault. Carlyle's conception of Mohammed, as far as we may judge, appears to have done in the main, some rough justice to his personal 1*72 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. Doubtless the chief reason of the rapid primitive suc- cess of Mohammed's faith, was the sword, sanctioned by all the authority of heaven — the sword carving rapidly an empire which arched from India to Spain, which sway- ed the mind, and almost the destinies of three Continents, and which an eminent German writer has even laid down as one of the three world-strides in the advance of know- ledge. But no moral cause of the success of Islamism purely as a religion, was perhaps more operative, than the opportunity of a corrupt Christianity, About the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century, a. d.. the gate of Zion was fairly flung open for the wild boar of the forest, or the lion of the desert, to enter. The great split of the Eastern and Western churches had occurred (the house was already divided against itself), and at the West the form of the Man of Sin had begun to take fearful dis- tinctness in the temple of God. In the East, especially in Syria, Arabia and Persia, the old Manichaean flame still glowed, the tremendous Arian controversy was not yet stilled ; the Nestorians offered a determined front to the character, and to have thrown a truer glance into the genuine Arab, than writers generally have done. But Carlyle has, in his down- handed strokes, wounded truth severely in continuing to call a mingling of human sagacity, religious emotiveness, truth, falsehood, cunning and passion, by the sacred name of prophet, a prophet being alone one who is inspired by the. Holy Ghost. " For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man : but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." It would seem sufficient to Mr. Carlyle, for one to have a brave insight into the "great Deep of Nature," or, in a word, to be a man of pre-eminent, swaying genius, to be a prophet. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 173 main church ; the Monsophytes, or since called Jacobites, were in bitter schismatic opposition, and still continue so ; in Syria and Mesopotamia, even Tritheism nourished, and according to Origen, in Egypt and Arabia the joining of the Virgin to the Godhead had adherents. Ever since the Council at Nice, there had been continual religious con- tention, reaching its acme at this period ; imperial and poli- tical disputes were fused with ecclesiastical; "Christianity was taken from the spirit and made sense ; there was no progressive inward union to the kingdom of God by faith, but outward mediation by signs and forms." * At the same time learning breathed but feebly in the cell and cloister, the Latin tongue had ceased from Italy, and philosophy was banished from the world, Aristotle being alone retained as a kind of dialectic master in controver- sy. Mohammed, at this crisis, ostensibly proclaimed a faith incapable of heresies, 2 indivisible into sects, the simple faith of Noah, and Abraham, and primitive man, though in fact a pure Deism, which, even if philosophically true, is not. as a modern author has pregnantly remarked, and never was, true religion. Christian schismatics, espe- cially the Nestorians, actively oppressed by the Greek and Catholic churches, were willing to advance far in union, even with an enemy, against a common foe ;' and the sim- plicity of Mohammed's faith without doubt contrasted fa- vorably with the miserable and incredible superstitions of 1 Neander. Hist, of the Christian Religion, Vol. III. " Spinoza. 3 The opening chapters of Evagrius's Ecclesiastical History give a most vivid impression of the deadly bitterness of religious strife in this age. 1 74 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. the Christian church, and this also had its influence But we have met with no reason to believe, as many have sup- posed, that Mohammed himself, whatever his followers did afterwards, knew aught truly of the doctrine of the Trinity, or had a further view than the assailing of Pagan polytheisms, and the sagacious turning to his own account of the debased, superstitious, tumultuary aspect with which Christianity presented itself at that time, especially in the eyes of the Eastern world ; yet we have no diffi- culty in believing, with a species of Islamic predestination itself, that Mohammed was raised up at this time espe- cially, and for the reasons of the peculiar and wounding controversies of the age, to be a rod to the corrupt and abandoned church of G-od. No cause, however, of the permanence of Islamism, and its wide and thorough conquest of the oriental world, even to the present moment, do we regard so important as the fact of its singular affiliation to the oriental character. This will require a rapid glance at one of the prominent characteristics of the East, which will in itself explain much more. Though it is universally known and believed that philosophy, religion, in fine all things intellectual and spiritual, have had their birth in the East, yet they have not had their final developments there ; though the germs of all things were, and are still, in the East, yet they have not there come to their maturity. The philosopher Cou- sin has hinted at this, in the idea, that in the very oriental mind, there seems to be a singular infancy of human na- ture ; and in childhood there is unity, or little feeling of THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 175 the need of spiritual progress, development and culture ; the elements of things are satisfying, there being a pre- dominance of nature over culture, of imagination over reason, and of sense over science. The orientals have been, and are still, as children, undisciplined, fanciful, seeking sensual contentment rather than hard and heav- enly virtue, loving the marvellous even more than the true, delighting in story more than argument ; if not too far effeminated by luxury, rejoicing also in war as do chil- dren ; with minds suggestive of all things divine and true, without the will to follow the suggestion ; with extreme re- ligious susceptibilities, but in spiritual things rising to the highest possible elevation, in mere visual speculation, or contemplative tranquillity, rather than in profound, vigor- ous, philosophical, or more than that, practical and life- regenerative faith. To such a nature Islamism was of- fered, and it was received like native food and kindred air. Its one simple religious element was enough to satis- fy the spiritual susceptibility and feed the religious feeling, thought and meditation, while it seemed to touch every other point of oriental character, and also of its peculiar depravity. It flattered the untamed pride and temper of exclusiveness, confirmed the love of war and conquest, strengthened the immemorial negative morality of the East, and gave latitude to its luxurious spirit. A union of devotion and indulgence, religious profession and easy life, profound form and inner tranquillity, precisely suited the oriental mind ; the cup was mixed so rarely with heaven and earth, that they could not refuse it. We see 1 76 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. sometimes this style of mind and character in Christian lands, where the sublimities of spiritual speculation are joined with earthly tempers and lusts, where devotion and life seem to be strangely divorced, and a religious profes- sion or philosophy exists, without having in it a spark of soul-life, or spiritual salvation. Nothing but the power of God, we must believe, exerted through his Word, by his Spirit, will ever remove the oriental mind from the em- brace of such a faith. We could not be just in giving the chief causes of the success and permanence of Islamism, without dwelling upon one other, simply the mixture of true with false. And this leads us to speak of Islamism more particularly as a religion, under which its true as well as false features, will briefly be noticed. Strictly as a faith, it may be re- garded historically, doctrinally and practically. Its source and moulding shape, whatever influences may have flowed in upon it afterwards, was unquestionably Mohammed himself. His own spirit, life, acts and sayings, and espe- cially the book which he left, the Koran, form the head- spring of this mighty fanaticism. In these the prime dog- ma, the essential faith, was given : " There is one God, and Mohammed is his prophet." Mohammed's own personal existence furnishes the tangible, visible nucleus of reli- gious affection, and the perpetual living religious model. Of the Koran, it can be said in a word, that it might have been written in the design of God, to show the abysmal chasm between a genuine and a spurious inspiration. It has been called " a counterfeit of the Pentateuch and a THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 177 plagiary of the Gospels," though much of its author is still discernible in its subtlety of thought, sagacious ob- scurity, and sometimes poetry. Written in the ancient Cufic, it settled the Arabic language as entirely, as did Luther's Bible the German language. Beyond the Chris- tian idea of Scriptural inspiration or reverence, a supersti- tious regard or worship is attached to the letter of the Ko- ran, as the embodiment of Divinity, or God really existing in the word. From the Koran, a theology and polity have been gradually drawn by commentary and practical application, which form Islamism as it now stands, and in many respects such as its founder never dreamed of. The polemic opposition which Islamism met from Christian writers of the Greek and Latin churches, would in itself compose a curious ecclesiastical history. The Greeks were especially severe, and as their swords failed, their pens grew sharp. A body of Greek apologies, hurled against Islam before 1200 a. d., bore the title of " BaortAeia," or the name of the emperor Joannis Cantacu- zeni. In a later age, among other writers, the reformers Savanarola and Luther were conspicuous ; the last in his rough German-Latin dealing most sturdy blows, although one shrewdly suspects he is ever chastising the Pope over Mohammed's back. 1 Augustine, and generally speaking, 1 Hard names abound in these Greek and Latin treatises. Thus a running commentary upon the Koran proceeds for many pages, almost simply thus : "Idiota!— Homo diabolicus ! — 178 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. the Roman church, in these assaults, treated Islamism as a Christian heresy, classing it particularly with the Noe- tian and Sabellian heresies. At the Council of Vienna, the Koran was forbidden to be read or opened by Latin Christians. It may be sufficient to remark here histori- cally, that Islamism of the present day has lost its fanati- cism, and therefore its chief religious energy ; rather ex- isting as a social and political principle, and grounding itself really more in oriental nature than belief. Doc- trinally considered, it has but one essential dogma, the unity of God ; to this, however, the false is immediately joined, of the prophetic nature of Mohammed. Thus this conjunction of the false with the true runs through the whole system, engrafting upon a few of the truths of Chris- tianity the death and corruption of superstition, like a living body tied to a corpse. If Mohammedans believe in a judgment, it is Mohammed who is to be judge of quick and dead ; and the terms of judgment are changed Primogenitus Satanae ! — Stulta, vana, et impia ! " — etc. One of Luther's characteristic sentences speaks of the especial doc- trines of the Gospel as " robustissima arma. Haec sunt tonitrua, quae destruunt non modo Mahometum, etiam portas inferi. Maho- metus enim negat Christum esse filium Dei. Negat ipsum mortuum pro nostris peccatis. Negat ipsum resurrexisse ad vitam nostram. Negat fide in ilium remitti peccatos et nos justificari. Negat ipsum judicem venturum super vivos et mortuos, licet resurrectionem mortuorum et diem judicii credat. Negat spiritum sanctum. Ne- gat ejus dona." It has been said that the contentions of Christian and Mohammedan -writers on the doctrines of freewill and predes- tination led the way to Pelagianism and to the Pelagian contro- versy. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 179 from the solemn standard of God's Word and Spirit, to children's play-terms. If heaven and hell are truths of belief, they are so wholly unsphered that " the powers of the world to come " have little more of spiritual energy than the apprehension of an earthly gaol, or the prospect of a kiosk amid the rushing streams and apricot-gardens of Damascus. As to the sensual character of the Moham- medan paradise, which some are disposed to deny, the truth as far as we may judge, is, that Mohammed himself intended the material view, that his immediate followers sincerely received it thus, and that while spiritualizing commentators have here and there sprung up and still form a class, the great body of Moslems, or the orthodox, have ever held and still most firmly hold the literal inter- pretation of the Koran, confirming this by their lives, for as the heaven of a faith is, so will the earthly lives of its believers be. If, likewise, there is even a. deep belief in the decrees of God, it is so generally deficient even in the Hebrew element of Divine complacency with good and separation from evil, that God is made the author and tempter of evil, and thus, of course, the moral sense receives a stunning blow as if from the hand of God him- self. Not only is Islamic predestination a dark necessi- ty, discovering nought of the intelligence of God and of adaptation to a Divine and infinite design, but it effectu- ally prostrates the pillar of man's freedom, which even the inexorable Greek " ei/xap/xeV^ " was saved from by the in- stinctive pride of human dignity, and it discerns no gleam of a Christian faith in the harmonious determinations of 180 NOTES OF A THEOLOGIOAL STUDENT. God with the moral nature of man ; so that while G-od reigns supreme, his moral creatures are as free as if he did not reign at all, thus throwing them on the unspeak- able gift and glory of self activity. 1 Even in the Moslem's belief in God, it is, without the Gospel manifestation of God, almost entirely a distant and awful abstraction, hav- ing its only human power in this principle of predestina- tion, or Asiatic resignation. There is no coming down of God to man in love, and no rising upward of man to God in faith. The infinite need of an incarnate, redeeming God, touching, meeting, regenerating sinful humanity by his descended Word and Spirit shed abroad, leaves the system a cold Deism, a philosophical creed, but not a reli- gion. There is, therefore, no spiritual and Divine life in the Mohammedan, although he believes in a God, and in future accountability. 2 This is strikingly shown in the practical workings of the system. 1 Moslem fatalism opposed to human consciousness, will yet be- come indirectly a moral lever to help upheave this system. Even quarantine was a great progress. 2 The Pythagorean, Gnostic and speculative elements of oriental mind and history, have entered also into Mohammedan theology, and we have in its bulky interpretations, glosses, systems and cat- echisms, the results of meditation upon many of the deeps of meta- physical and religious thought, as the being of God, freewill, elec- tion, virtue, faith, etc., and it becomes interesting to follow the hu- man mind even in such contrasted circumstances on these incessant problems of nature. The following are two or three extracts, taken here and there, from the " Catechism of Omer Nessefy." '•' Art. 2. The attributes of God do not constitute his essence ; the word is in God's eternal essence. "Art. 19. Faith consists in the admission and profession of all which has been announced from God. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 181 As a system of good works and purely formal, even the Catholic faith in its strictest days has hardly surpassed it in scrupulosity ; hut then it lodges in the stiff branches "Art. 20. The acts of believers are susceptible of more or less ; belief ought to be absolute. " Art. 21. Belief does not differ from resignation. " Art. 22. Believers and unbelievers are able to lose and recov- er faith ; but the faith of the elect is not shaken by this, because the future is unchangeable in the Divine essence." — L'empire Otto- man, Chauvin Baillard. Faith in God ; from the Mohammedan Catechism : "Faith in God consists in knowing truly -with the heart and confessing openly with the mouth, that the most high God exists ; that He is true, permanent and very essence; that He is eternal in relation to the past, having never begun, and eternal also in rela- tion to the future, since He is without the necessity of an end ; that there appertaineth to Him neither place, time, figure, nor any out- ward form whatever — no motion, change, transposition, separation, division, fraction or fatigue ; that He is without equal and without parallel ; that He is perfectly pure, one, everlasting, and liv- ing ; that He is omniscient, omnipotent and sovereign ; that He hears, sees, speaks, acts, creates, sustains; that He produces in- telligently ; that He causes to live, and causes to die ; that He gives beginning to all, and makes all to return to their original state, whenever he pleases ; that he judges, decrees, directs, commands, prohibits; that He conducts in the right way and leads into error; and that to Him belong retribution, reward, punishment, favor and victory. It is necessary further to believe, that all these eternal attributes aie embraced in his essential Being, and subsist in Him from everlasting to everlasting, without division or variation, yet so that it can neither be said that these attributes are Himself, nor that they are essentially different from Himself, since each of them is conjoined with another, as, for example, life with knowledge, and knowledge with power. Such are the great and inestimable perfec- tions of the most high God, under which He is known and adored by the faithful. Whoever dares to deny them or to call them into question, whether in whole or in part, truly he is an infidel. O God ! preserve Thou us from infidelity ! " — Southgate's Travels in Persia, etc. 182 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. of prescriptive formula and objective duty, without influ- ence to produce that inwrought holiness, or even pure morality, which faith in Christ necessitates from its very nature. The four great prescriptive duties of Islamism are prayer, fasting, alms, and pilgrimage to Mecca ; and by these rounds of works the Mohammedan climbs to his paradise. The Mohammedan prayer is something more than picturesque ; it is impressive to behold the Moham- medan at his devotions, his simple, manly, unabashed prostration before God, in the field or the town, whenever the Muezzin calls from his minaret, or whenever the sun comes forth, touches the meridian, and sinks beneath the horizon, without regard to place, occupation or company. But what are his prayers % Are they a spiritual commu- nion with God ? are they confessions of sin ? are they the breathings of penitence 1 are they the pleadings for par- don ? are they purifyings of the heart, or even expressions of holy, devotional desire ? This can hardly be claimed. The brief Mohammedan creed, repeated and repeated, with a few variations in general ascriptions of praise, con- stitute the prayer itself, while physical prostrations and attitudes make up the rest. It is, in fact, chiefly a bodily exercise, and allies itself, with certainly a high degree of outward dignity and propriety, to all physical methods of worship, of which we see an instance among ourselves, in the Shaker communities. The Mohammedan rises from his prayer to the life of sense which he led before ; 1 and 1 In riding from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, I was accompanied by a noble looking, middle-aged Arab sheikh, who was a renowned THE RELIUION OF ISLAM. 183 the same remark will apply to tlie religious fast of the Ra- mazan. The Mohammedan generally observes this fast with rigor, even the solitary Bedouin on the desert, ac- cording to the exact Burckhardt, confining himself to half a pound of black bread in the twenty-four hours ; but the manner in which all, from the sultan on the throne to the poorest - fellah" at the water-wheel, rush back again to their old vices, at the moment the cannon booms to an- nounce the close of the fast, shows how little of a spiritual or chastening character it has, and how purely it is a mat- ter of Stoic endurance. So the matter of alms, is chiefly a form, regulated by a species of poll-tax ; and the pilgri- mage to Mecca, if it ever had a religious character, has long since become a sad business of mingled money-mak- ing, vagabondism and immorality ; a " hadji," or pilgrim, being almost synonymous with a worthless fellow. No longer does the magnificence of mighty caravans issuing from the arched gateways of Bagdad and Damascus, lend "santon" or saint. Five times in the course of the ride, whenever we came to sweet running water, the chief dismounted, washed his face, hands and f jet, spread the carpet, which formed his saddle- cloth, upon the'ground, stuck his long lance upright at one of its corners, and turning his face towards Mecca, went through his de- votions, touching his forehead in the dust in token of humiliation ; yet at the close of the day, the same man attempted to practise upon me a fraud. But this need not give a whole impression of Moslem piety, for in that species of devotion which springs from the emo- tions and sentiments merely, as we have said, the orientals are emi- nent, and we believe that under the teachings of a true religion they would not only have the feeling, the sentiment, the ecstasy of devotion, but the calm faith, intelligent principle and reasonable hope. 184 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. solemnity and pomp to these pilgrimages, and cover up their inutility, puerile superstition and vices. The civil morality of Islamism, drawn from the reli- gious, has no higher character. The law of revenge, or the talio, is directly enforced from the Koran. Slavery has also in the Koran express sanction, and by Mohammedan theocratic statute, absolute power is given to the master, and all civil or judicial protection removed from the slave. Polygamy, connected with pliant divorce and slave concu- binage, opens the door to sensuality, only limited by the wealth and power of the individual. It is true, that earth and heaven, according to Islamism, are made for man, and woman has at best an uncertain, and always a degraded place, in either. The names of the crimes themselves, under the Mohammedan civil law, exhibit the mournful condition of the public morals, and in the administration of justice the grossest bribery universally prevails. At the present day even some of the old prescriptive Moham- medan virtues are vanishing, and intemperance itself is rushing upon the oriental world, the traveller's boat up the river Nile being lighted by night with the fires of dis- tilleries The attempted reforms of the father of the pre- sent sultan, have only precipitated the grave Ottoman into the more shameless profligacy of the French school of vice, and by the testimony of intelligent travellers, throughout Persia and the more interior Mohammedan countries, the most profound and awful sensuality reigns. Yet strange to say, the Mohammedan makes his boast of the morality of his religion, and shameful as the truth is, in many re- THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 185 spects, in general integrity, solidity and dignity of charac- ter, he rises superior to the nominal Christian with whom he daily comes in contact. He has recently shown a no- ble example of the ancient Moslem virtue of hospitality in his treatment of the Hungarian exiles, against whose ancestors his own once so fiercely contended, the candele- bras which now light the mosque of St. Sophia having been plundered from Hungarian temples. And the Mo- hammedan is exceedingly affected by the example of a high morality wherever it appears, giving a hope of a speedier triumph of pure Christianity among the Moham- medans whenever it shall begin to move upon them. Let us, in conclusion, say a few words as to the present condi- tion of Islamism, especially in its relations to Chris- tianity. We have not pretended in the foregoing rapid sketch of Islamism and the causes of its success and permanence, to impart any new truth, but would only desire to draw more thought to this great field which is sooner or later to be possessed by Christ, comprising an eighth portion of the souls of the world. We have not concealed a certain respect for this religion, which, so mingled with false as to be wholly falsified, is yet so superior to the thousand fetisch superstitions that shine not with one ray of spiritual or even philosophic light. It is, in truth, rather a Christian, or at least Judaic heresy, than a simple heathenism, being at the time of its rise, a rude and fierce reaffirmation of the truth respecting God, when idolatry was fast destroy- ing the purity of true religion. Of course the great ob- 9* 186 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. stacle to the progress of Christianity among the Moham- medans is the law respecting apostasy. This is the mighty crime of the Mohammedan, and if not retracted after the third time, is punishable with death ; and the homicide of the apostate is counted no crime. But this law will evi- dently not long resist the progress of Providence, for al- ready Islamism, in a hundred instances, has receded from its own standards, and permitted unheard of innovations. It has "become a tolerant system, every religion through- out the sultan's dominion being now protected by law, whereas the successor of the prophet is bound to wage ex- terminating war against all unbelief, and to offer the sword's edge or the creed " Namaz" to every man, and all the world. The sword itself of the Moslem is broken, and the faith, therefore, has lost its great propagandist, and it consequently no longer grows. The religious zeal of Islam has also become cooled, its own piety has grown dull, rationalistic disputes have arisen, and absolute skep- ticism has crept extensively over the Mohammedan mind. 1 When thought is aroused, the inconsistencies and falsities of their faith appear glaring, and it is alone the profound principle of predestination, or stirless obedience to the system of things or laws under which they find themselves, which prevents oriental minds from outbreaking into open denial or higher truth. Islamism being itself essentially "V * Even the first child of Islamism, the Bedouin of the desert, is heard to say jestingly, according to Niebuhr : " the religion of Mohammed could not be made for us. We have no water for ablu- tion on the desert ; we have no money for alms ; we already fast the year round; and God is every where, therefore why go to Mecca? " THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 18*7 a politico-religious system, the polity being drawn from the faith, the civil and religious power are of course indis- solubly united ; they stand or fall together ; for without the Mohammedan state there is no Mohammedan church, the visible " Iman" or representative of the Prophet being the sultan himself, who, like the Pope, constitutes not only the head, but the very principle of the religion. The present hollow vastness, therefore, of the Islamic empire, portends the hollow weakness of Islamism, the religion having no distinctive, separate principle of life. All it has of good belongs to Christianity, and all its evil is inwoven with its secular decaying policy. God seems always to have wrought with a peculiarity of provi- dence in the East; He has wrought at long intervals, and then suddenly. Continual progress, as at the West, does not seem to be the law of oriental existence. The inhabit- ants of the East are a wonderfully fixed quantity; the customs and opinions which sway the enlightened world do not seem to reach them ; the revolutions which like magnetic storms sweep over Europe, reverberate faintly, and die away on their unsympathetic shores ; there the people stand, like their own mysterious temples of the past, hardly touched by cycles, themselves the most im- pressive antiquities ; the Samaritans were Samaritans until they were extinct ; the Jews are still Jews ; the Ishmaelites are still Ishmaelites : a Mohammedan once, an Eastern proverb is, a Mohammedan for ever. When- ever a change occurs in the East, it seems to be by the fiat of Omnipotence. The Exodus of the Hebrews, the 188 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. rise of Christianity, the springing up of Islamism, all were sudden and miraculous movements, in which the hand of G-od was awfully visible. It seems as if a more direct Divine interposition, more regardless of means, wrought in the East ; and now that Mohammedanism has answered its predestined end, may not God, by one of those sudden and omnipotent decrees, cause the Mohammedan religion to go down and disappear, as quickly and startlingly as it rose ? This may sound visionary, but looking at the pe- culiar nature of the system, its linked destiny with the secular power, its abstract, indistinctive, unvital character as a faith, and its past relation in the providence of God, we cannot believe that, unassailable as it now appears, it is to be vanquished by Christianity by slow steps, rood after rood, region after region, but that it is destined to fall rapidly under the unseen hand of God. Yet any theory like this, should not blind the eyes, or deter the effort, in present missionary responsibility toward the Mo- hammedan. The missionary world should not neglect in its action, and certainly in its prayers, him, who has al- ready so much of common ground with the Christian. If direct action cannot yet be made for his spiritual welfare, much can be done indirectly, as a preparation for the time when the civil obstacles shall cease before the pressing force of political necessity ; for religious freedom to the Moslem, is the next step which naturally follows the reli- gious freedom to Christians and other religionists, already secured by the firm intervention of England in Turkey, and lately in Persia. Seven centuries ago there existed between Christianity THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 189 and Islamism an antagonism of temporal power, in which perhaps the preponderance of authority, and certainly the higher tone of outer refinement and elevation, belonged to the latter cause ; now, the visible opposition has nearly passed away, and the moral antagonism remains. But this, though it may be as strong as ever, presents a far more favorable position of things in a religious view; for while absolute interdiction still closes the mind of the Mohammedan, he has nevertheless the opportunity of re- flection, and therefore for a long time past he has mani- fested evident signs of intellectual curiosity, of looks di- rected toward a higher civilization, and even of moral and religious antipathies being softened by closer and quicker contact with Christian faith and intelligence. There are indications, also, of Christian attention being directed to- ward the Moslem world. The rapidly and ruthlessly en- croaching vastness of adjacent European powers, the dan- gerous condition of the Mohammedan empire, held togeth- er chiefly by the pressure of outside forces, its compelled and unwilling admixture with European questions, its awkward attempts to meet the progress of the age in civil and social reform, the frequency of travel in Mohammedan lands, and the unavoidable encounter of Christian mis- sionaries with Moslem mind, have in these latter days brought the Mohammedan prominently before us. His claims, we think, upon our religious sympathies, are great. 1 1 Even an occasional discourse, such as our missionary, Rev. Mr. Hamblin, not long since preached in Constantinople, on the Orien- 190 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. All religious writers on the East agree, that the power of a pure Christian example will be a great means of turn- ing the eyes of the Mohammedan to Christ, and this ex- ample will be furnished, it is hoped, in the fast-increasing body of missionaries and their converts in the East. Already the Turks have begun to discriminate between the oriental Christian and the Protestant ; and their ad- miration for the higher purity, elevation, truth and spiritu- ality of the latter, has often exhibited itself unmistakably. But we look to a still mightier agent in the silent leavening and preparation of the Mohammedan mind and heart for a thorough and moral transformation — the power of the Word of God. Mohammedans acknowledge the Divine inspiration of the Christian and Jewish Scriptures, and of late, especially in the city of Constantinople, they have begun to read the Gospel, with more than a feeling of cu- riosity. There is a call for a Turkish translation, especial- ly of the New Testament, and the discovery is beginning to dawn upon many a darkened Moslem mind, that all the good which their own faith boasts, is here found in its pure head-springs ; and when the word of Christ finds entrance, his faith follows. Often the heart is reached through the door of the mind, and the oriental possesses a mind of original powers, as history has now and then shown, which, even under the pressure of centuries of fa- talistic inaction, has yet preserved a manly living instinct tal Churches and Mohammedanism, shows that the encountering re- lation of the latter with Christianity, and their pressure on the missionary responsibility, are beginning to be felt. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 191 for the good and true. A vein of conviction sometimes struggles upward to the light through the mountains of Islamic ignorance and sensualism, from the central gold of Divine thought in the human mind — an aspiration which seeks for something more of God, than the bare knowledge of his existence and power. God manifest in the flesh, the love of God in Christ to man, has, it is said, started even the apathetic Turk into strange emotion and reflection. This alone, the Gospel salvation, can arouse the Mohammedan from the profound sleep, the terrible entombment of spiritual life, in which he is buried. This alone can infuse animation through those lethargic king- doms, those hundred millions of souls stretched in % " the sleepy drench Of that forgetful lake" of strong delusion. The Gospel of Christ can alone even bring the infancy of the East to the full manhood of con- science, reason and action. The temporal as well as the eternal salvation of the fast sinking East, can only come through true Christianity awakening the sense of moral responsibility and freewill, and thereby invigorating the oriental mind. That mind, through whose medium the Bible came to men, feeling again the impulse of Divine inspiration pouring through it the tide of life and hope, may throw off its bands, and in the first home of the hu- man race, the garden of the world, the birth-place of our heavenly religion, the freest and largest developments of that religion may yet be seen. The latent devotion of the 192 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. Eastern nature, awoke to its perfect and grandest energy by the Spirit of God, may produce, as far as they may be reproduced in uninspired men, Peters and Johns and Pauls, not as types, but as classes. Woman in the East, giving the contradiction to the cruel faith of Islam wher- ever she has heard the name of Christ and His spiritual life, faith and kingdom, shall hail with joy the coming of a pure religion, appealing to a quick conscience, and a noble self-activity. The free Christian home and altar shall then be erected on the ruins of polygamy and slavery. All classes, united by the common faith and love of Christ, and regulated by Christian equal laws, shall take the place of the personal despotism of individuals and the sunken degradation of the masses, which is the immemorial type of Eastern and Mohammedan society. Above all, the cold, gloomy, vast void between God and man, inducing a still and frozen religion, shall be filled by the Divine love of Christ's religion, the atoning Love of the Son of G-od, awakening to love, faith, holiness, hope, human fel- lowship, mental and spiritual activity, freedom, develop- ment, progress and life. The East shall feel the touch of Christ and shall arise, and not before. Should we not give to it the Word of Life, even where we may not yet send the preacher ? * 1 The above was composed and published before the agitations which now rock the East had begun. Even in the light of these last events I hold the same instinctive opinions concerning the faith whose destiny has assumed so singular and wide-spread political importance. I truly believe that the Mohammedan empire must quickly have and accept the Gospel, in order to be preserved either THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 193 spiritually or politically, — that this is its only salvation, — and also that its immobile faith will be more suddenly than gradually brought to an end, but perhaps in a manner not anticipated by any reflective man two years since, or by Russia herself, and yet in a way not overthrowing the theory which has been feebly shadowed forth. "With thousands in this land I have been deeply aroused by the re- verberation of that war of colossal aggression, claiming actual power in a foreign empire through childish titulars, and which appears to hide profound designs of hostility to freedom itself, beneath the mask of the Christian religion. Christianity came into this world to renew instead of to annihilate, to save and not to destroy. Chris- tianity says, better a nation saved, than a nation destroyed on ac- count of its false faith. The Moslem's soul is dear to God. And the day has passed when religion can justify the motive of human or national destruction. The language concerning Christ is, "He shall not strive nor cry. A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory, and in his name shall the Gentiles trust." The triumph of Christianity through the nations shall be won by moral not material power. The suffering innocence and celestial love of Christ shall conquer this world, his mild heart stealiug into it and subduing it unto himself. Shall the ages of persecution be re-acted upon this earth ? It seemed as if the distorted moral glare of the Crusades was melting into the gentle meridian light of a true Christianity. The idolater is now recognized as having just rights, and the crimi- nal has not lost, beyond the statute of God and the welfare of society, his human claims. It were indeed wonderful if God chose the way of annihilating Mohammedanism, by saving the Mohammedan people through gen- erous Christian instrumentality. This would be returniug upon that wounding and desolating system, the deep revenge of Christ, which is love. The fifth article of the treaty of Alliance between Turkey and the Christian Powers, which renders to all the religious subjects of the Sublime Porte, equal civil rights, strikes atone of the main roots of Islamism, and must inflict an incurable blow upon a system whose religious life intertwines with its civil, and both have their energy in the intense sentiment of the divinely elected and in- finite superiority of the Moslem, whether as nation or individual. It is a subject of devout gratitude to God that the Christian 194 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. Missions in the Mohammedan empire are now preserved in the un- expected and only manner in which they could have heen preserved in a war with Russia, that sooner or later was inevitable. God's ways are a great deep. Through this seething chaos beginning to work in the East, and destined to upheave Asia, and to roll back perhaps its billows over Europe, the Spirit of God is moving, and shaping all to some perfect end. §etI]Ujmu, BETHLEHEM. Out from Gaza, the sea-gate of the Holy Land coining from Egypt, I rode to Askelon, dashing over its prostrate pillars, to seek an escape from a thunderstorm sweeping down from Mount Lebanon, that hissed through the black ruined walls and towers of the old Philistine city, as if shrieking the eternal prophecy against Askelon, " Aske- lon shall not be inhabited ! " — And from a sheltered nook under the great cliff which overhangs the Mediterranean, I watched the excited waves, as they ran up to the very foot of the cliff, higher and higher, their roar growing louder and louder, impetuously climbing up nearly to the wall of the precipice, and returning back moaningly, roll- ing over and crushing the delicate white shells and stones, moving and grinding the sea-sand, and with the increasing fury of the tempest ploughing the long beach as if by a mighty harrow, sweeping up to view the mud, weeds, and trophies of the deep sea, and then dragging them back again into its dark bosom, and I thought of the words of Isaiah, uttered from observation of the same sea, not far from where I was then standing, of the " troubled sea " of 198 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. the wicked heart " when it cannot rest," whose " waters cast up mire and dirt." — its fierce striving after, falling back and never attaining, its impotent, aimless tossing, writhing, flinging upwards, murmuring, and foaming, its rushing after happiness and breaking on the stern rocks, its heav- ing up its own treasures to deposit them in a place of rest, and having them dragged back again into the depths of perpetual despair, by a downward resistless power. From Gaza I rode through the flowery vale of Sharon, by the tall tower and silent white necropolis of Ramlah, among the deep windings of the stern and gloomy hills of Judea, until through an overpowering impulse, be it called superstition or not, I found myself on my knees, with start- ing tears, at the sight of Jerusalem. It was not from the East, nor Jerusalem, that we first approached Bethlehem, but from that extinguished Phle- gethon of the Mar Saba, the lower volcanic gorge of the Kidron, where the Coenobism of the early centuries of the church, amid horrid grotesque rocks and awful shadows, found its sepulchral skeleton religious idea tremendously realized. The first part of our journey from the Greek Con- vent, was threading slowly the defiles of knife-edged vol- canic rocks without a tree or shrub, and now and then from some higher point catching a glimpse of the Dead Sea far below us shining dull like a bedewed mirror, in the sun's rays, and a cloud of thin and half illuminated mist going up continually from its bosom. We at length reached a somewhat opener country, where the hills grew faintly greener, and the valleys broader. BETHLEHEM. 199 On one of these high table-land plains, we met an old Bedouin Arab and his family, who had come up here to pasture his camels in the dry season. The aged man stood at his tent door. He was such a picture of Abraham, as Michael Angelo would have rapidly painted in ample fresco, somewhat ruder and simpler it is true than the powerful and rich patriarch, but of a grand outline, his sun- darkened face like a bronze of Arezzo. surmounted by a lofty caftan set high back from his swelling forehead, his features regular and noble, his eye clear, soft, and large, his snow white beard sweeping on his breast. He stood erect, clad in flowing and somewhat brightly colored burnous, with one hand resting easily upon his silken girdle, and the other grasping a long staff. He saluted us with dignity, with his sons, slaves, and herds about him. Yet though perchance one of Abraham's own children in the flesh, he was alien in the spirit, and belonged to the lopped branch of Ishmael, and to the frenzied disciples of the False Prophet. But even thus in objects of moral opposition, images of sacred things are easily suggested under such circumstances ; for in a land like this, one travels with the religious eyes of a child, and not with the hard eyes of a philosopher. One feels indeed as if he were himself a child moving on in some religious c Mystery,' or ' Divine Comedy,' or as if a more awful and early world was sur- rounding and shutting him in, and every rock grows mys- terious, and every being wears an aureole around his head. All things are viewed with a more heart-touched and mo- ther-taught piety. 200 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. After some hours, across a deep and wide valley, far off, on the very climax of the rising hill region towards the north, Jerusalem appeared before us, and at this dis- tance, with its soaring site, long battlemented walls, massy flanking towers, and tall tapering minarets elancing from heavy domes, it appeared to possess all its attributes of pristine and even of ideal splendor, to be a city, as the painter exclaimed, "built for eternity ! " Another town was soon before us on the west, the lit- tle one of Bethlehem, and we were then at one angle of a comparatively diminutive triangle, whose other angles were Bethlehem and Jerusalem. This compressed nature of the scenery of the Holy Land, strikes a traveller in Palestine with his first astonishment. With the involun- tary association of the infinite facts connected with these scenes, with the shadows of heavenly things suspended over them, they notwithstanding lie all as in the bowl of the hand, and from some high Quarantania or regal Her- mon, almost the whole of that "glorious land" ' may be seen, over which God " bowed the heavens and came down." As we approached Bethlehem over an undulating and broken country, I looked curiously at every valley which ran up among the hills, where perhaps at rare intervals a few sheep were feeding, for here, sitting on this bold over- hanging entrance rock, the singer of .Israel might have touched his early harp to music, springing even then from a deeper inspiration than the inward stir of genius, and its source, to himself a sacred awe. Exposed to the ele- 1 Daniel 11: 16. BETHLEHEM. 201 nients, the luminous vault of the Syrian sky bended above him, with its flaming sun and its wonderful stars, the wild high hills around him, and the quiet flocks at his feet, the young psalmist might here perhaps have struck the first rude chords of that glorious psalm of natural praise : " Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the Lord from the heavens : Praise him in the heights. Praise ye him, all his angels: Praise ye him, all his hosts. Praise ye him, sun and moon : Praise him, all ye stars of light. Praise him, ye heaven of heavens, And ye waters that be above the heavens. Praise the Lord from the earth, Ye dragons, and all deeps; Fire, and hail ; snow, and vapors ; Stormy wind fulfilling his word: Mountains, and all hills ; Fruitful trees, and all cedars: Beasts, and all cattle ; Creeping things, and flying fowl ; Kings of the earth, and all people ; Princes, and all judges of the earth : Both young men, and maidens ; Old men, and children: Let them praise the name of the Lord : For his name alone is excellent ; His glory is above the earth and heaven." The Judacan scenery here, without having any thing in it large or sublime, had nevertheless, looking off from its breezy summits and going down into its deep vales, much that was inspiring, for even in a naked and desolate hill country, there is always something to fix the eye in the 10 202 NOTES OF A THEOLOGICAL STUDENT. ever new combinations of hill forms, and there is an elastic lifting and swelling of the spirit, as if, one has finely said, the land itself were lifting and flowing around. The mountains of Judaea, unlike the majestic ranges of nor- thern Syria, have no grandeur, and are also naked and unsoftened, showing generally but the yellow volcanic limestone, as if it were still a cursed land, over which the old prophecies yet hung in their power, dryness and gloom. But among these close, furrowed hills, the primitive He- brew, fighting with hard nature, as well as the brass- sheathed Philistines, and entirely cut off by mountain, de- sert and sea from other nations, nursed just those quali- ties of perseverance, solitariness, firmness, even obstinacy of character, which made him. like his own Mount Zion, to stand the faithful conservator of precious truth, among so many loose, dark, billowy, and swiftly vanishing idolatrous Asiatic peoples and ages, until the divine ful- ness of time. Now the busy genius of the Hebrew no longer moves like a spirit over these hills, guarding the small soil from the sheeted rains, and carefully training the few springs to wind among the ashy valleys. There is no dotting of cattle upon a thousand hills, no shouting of the vine-dressers when in glad fury the red wine press is trodden. The stalwart reapers of Boaz are low, the bar- ley and the wheat harvests are thin, and "the laborers are few." All around Jerusalem, and all Judaea, forming a great contrast with the lovely pastoral plains of Samaria and Galilee, it is a very solemn land, sunny and solemn, and silent like a sunshiny graveyard. Judaea now is like her own Rachel, sitting in the dust, BETHLEHEM. 203 with a coarse Bedouin blanket over her head for a sack- cloth, " weeping for her children because they are not." As one approaches the immediate neighborhood of Bethlehem the thin vegetation brightens and deepens, and in the number of dark-leaved fig trees, silver olives, palms, glossy vineyards, and gardens fenced with the curling speckled monster cactus, David's town yet preserves its ancient fame, of the fruitful. At length Bethlehem itself was directly before us, a wedge-shaped mass of square, white, glistening stone houses, rising step-like one above another, the lower line being terminated by the massive walls and towers of the Greek convent, and the whole compact diminutive town standing upon the rising crest of a hill, or spur of a mountain, on either side of which ran gorge-like valleys east and west. The mountain slopes and ravines on either side of the town were considerably wooded and green, the plough had been lately at work, and the dews of heaven seemed to fall more kindly, and the sun to bend less menacingly upon this blessed spot. The long deep vale which runs north of the hill of Bethlehem, when I glanced up its narrow bay winding into the higher regions of the Carmelite ridge, was filled with the motley-colored and sweet-scented blossoms of the bean harvest ; and in this vale, tradition says, the shep- herds were watching their flocks by night, when the " tid- ings of great joy," — the " good news " from God. dropt upon their bewildered senses, and that sublime solecism in heaven took place, and the great silent gates of eternity swung open, and the seraphim doxology of