"Christian morality (so-called) has all the characters of a reaction, it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative, rather than positive; passive, rather than active; Innocence, rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic pursuit of Good; in its precepts (as has been well said), 'thou shalt not' predominates unduly over 'thou shalt.' In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually compromised away into one of legality. . . It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established; who, indeed, are not to be actively obeyed when they command what religion forbids, but who are not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for any amount of wrong to ourselves... What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian."

Mr. Mill subsequently concedes that "every thing which is excellent in ethics may be brought within the sayings of Christ" without excessive violence to their language; but he leaves the preceding remarks unchanged.-[Essay "On Liberty"; Boston ed., 1863: pp. 95–97.

LXXII. p. 280.-"Looking with human eyes, it is not possible to see how the evil could have been avoided. The wickedness long entrenched in the world; that under-current of sin which runs through the nations; the low civilization of the race; the selfishness of strong men, their awful wars; the hideous sins of slavery, polygamy; the oppression of the weak; the power of lust, brutality, and every sin,these were obstacles that even Christianity could not sweep away in a moment, though strongest of the daughters of God.. Let us judge

these men lightly. Low as the church was in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, it yet represented the best interests of mankind, as no other institution."-[Theodore Parker: "Discourse of Religion": Boston ed., 1842 : pp. 403-4.

NOTES TO LECTURE IX.

NOTE I.: PAGE 288.-The following extracts, from widely differing authors, illustrate clearly the change referred to:

"Nemesis was originally, as it appears, a goddess of nature, only known in particular localities, and honoured at Smyrna and Cyzicus, at Patræ, and in Asia Minor, but especially at Rhamnus in Attica; and in that character she was mother of Helena by Zeus. From the time of the Persian wars she acquired an ethical signification, and became the goddess of justice, assigning to each his measure, and giving every one his due, the personification of the jealousy ascribed to the gods by the ancients; and hence she was contemplated often as an inimical power, morose and threatening toward the prosperous, but ever the avenger of all insolence."—[Döllinger: "The Gentile and the Jew"; London ed., 1862: Vol. 1: p. 99.

"Nemesis is the fundamental idea of the Greek drama. It appears strongest in Eschylus, as a prophetic and awful law, mysteriously felt, and terribly revealed. Sophocles uses it to point the deep moralities which govern human life. In Euripides it degenerates into something more akin to a sense of vicissitudes; it becomes more sentimental -less a religious or moral principle than a phenomenon inspiring fear and pity... Entirely to eliminate the idea of Nemesis which gave its character to Greek tragedy was what Euripides, had he been so inclined, could hardly have succeeded in effecting. Thougu he never impresses on our minds the dogma of an avenging deity, like Eschylus, or of an inevitable law, like Sophocles, he makes us feel the chance and change of human life, the helplessness of man, the stormy sea of passions, sorrows, and vicissitudes on which the soul is tossed. With him, the affairs of life are no longer based upon a firm founda. tion of Divine law, but gods intervene mechanically and freakishly like the magicians in Ariosto or Tasso. Their agency is valuable, not as determining the moral conduct of the personages, but as an exhibition of supernatural power which brings about a sudden revolution of events."[Symonds: "Greek Poets"; First Series; London ed., 1877 : pp. 204, 215-17.

II. : : p. 289.-"Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by her : powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her. Without asking or warning, she snatches us up into her circling dance, and whirls us on until we are tired, and drop from her arms. . . She is always building up and destroying; but her workshop is inaccessible. . . She rejoices in illusion. Whoso destroys it in himself and others, him she punishes with the sternest tyranny. . . She tosses her children out of nothingness, and tells them not whence they came, nor whither they go. It is their business to run, she knows the road. She wraps man in darkness, and makes him forever long for light. She creates him dependent upon the earth, dull and heavy; yet is always shaking him until he attempts to soar above it. . . She is vanity of vanities; but not to us, to whom she has made herself of the greatest importance."-[Goethe: Aphorisms on Nature: trans. by T. H. Huxley, in "Nature," Vol. 1: pp. 9-10. (Goethe's "Werke"; Stuttgart, 1881; Band XXXVI.: S. 227, f.)

III. p. 289.-"It teaches [the doctrine of transmigration] that the present life is but one of an indefinite series of existences which each individual soul is destined to pass through; that death is only the ter mination of one, and the entrance upon another, of the series. Fur ther, it holds that all life is one in essence; that there is no fundamental difference between the vital principle of a human being and that of any other living creature; so that, when a soul quits its tenement of flesh, it may find itself next imprisoned in the body of some inferior animal; being, in fact, liable to make experience of all the various forms of life, in its progress toward the final consummation of its existence... The inexorable fate which dooms each creature to a repeated entrance upon a life full of so many miseries in the present, fraught with such dangers for the future, is what the Hindu dreads, and would escape. He flies from existence, as the sum of all miseries; the aim of his life is to make sure that it be the last of him. . . The antiquity of this strange doctrine, and its dominion over the popular mind of India, are clearly shown by the fact that even Buddhism, the popular revolution against the creeds and the forms of the Brahmanic religion, implicitly adopted it, venturing only to teach a new and more effective method of escaping from the bonds of existence into the longed-for freedom of nonentity."-[Prof. W. D. Whitney: "Oriental and Linguistic Studies": 1st Series; New York ed., 1872: pp. 46–7.

IV.: p. 290.-"They [the Egyptians] were also the first to broach the opinion that the soul of man is immortal, and that, when the body dies, it enters into the form of an animal which is born at the moment, thence passing on from one animal into another, until it has circled

through the forms of all the creatures which tenant the earth, the water, and the air, after which it enters again into a human frame, and is born anew. The whole period of the transmigration is, they say, three thousand years. There are Greek writers, some of an earlier, some of a later date, who have borrowed this doctrine from the Egyp tians, and put it forward as their own. I could mention their names, but abstain from doing so."-[Herodotus: II.: 123.

"He himself [Empedocles, of Agrigentum] had already been bird shrub, and fish, young man and maiden. . . As even the spirits nearest of kin, when enclosed in strange bodies, did not recognize one another here below, it came to pass that by putting animals to a painful death, and eating them, the son sinned against the father, the children of her womb against their mother, for they fed on the flesh of their parents; and therefore the sparing of animal life, and abstinence from fleshmeat, became a sacred obligation. If the philosopher did not extend this further, to the vegetable world, he only abstained from so doing partly on the score of impossibility, partly on the hypothesis that by the destruction of vegetable existence the transition into a higher organism was rendered possible to the indwelling spirit."—[Döllinger: "The Gentile and the Jew"; London ed., 1862: Vol. 1: p. 265.

V.: p. 291.-" Connected with the re-awakening of the dead, at least in some of the more recent, or post-Christian, writings of the Persians, there is frequent mention of a glorious hero-prophet, by whose ministry, as one chief organ of Ormazd, the empire of the devs shall be subverted, earth herself shall be restored to something of her pristine glory, and the wrongs of man redressed. The name of this expected champion of the Perso-Aryan race is Sosiosh (the Benefactor). The meagre hint of Sosiosh, thus communicated in the early part of the Avesta, was expanded and embellished in the works of the Sassanian epoch, and especially in the Bundehesh. That benefactor was from first to last a man; and like two other beings, his precursors, now associated with him in the work of liberation, and each reigning in succession for a thousand years, he was distinctly held to be the offspring of the holy Zoroaster; yet the name of Sosiosh alone, as greatest or as last in order of the hero-prophets, was the rallying-point where Persians were accustomed to find refuge from the miseries of their present lot."-[Hardwick: "Christ, and other Masters"; London ed., 1882: pp. 566-7.

VI.: p. 291.-"Now comes the last age of the Cumaan Song; the great series of the centuries is born anew. At length the Virgin returns; returns the Saturnian reign; at length a new generation of men is sent down from high heaven."-[Virgil: Eclogue IV.: 4-7.

VII.: P. 291.-" But among all the useful institutions that demonstrate the superior excellence of the Roman Government, the most considerable perhaps is the opinion which the people are taught to hold concerning the gods; and that which other men regard as an object of disgrace, appears in my judgment to be the very thing by which this republic is chiefly sustained. I mean superstition; which is impressed with all its terrors, and which influences both the private actions of the citizens, and the public administration of the state, to a degree that can scarcely be exceeded. . . As the people are always fickle and inconstant, filled with irregular desires, precipitate in their passions, and prone to violence, there is no way to restrain them but by the dread of things unseen, and by the pageantry of terrifying fiction. The ancients therefore acted not absurdly, nor without good reason, when they inculcated the notions concerning the gods, and the belief of infernal punishments."-[Polybius: Gen. Hist. VI. Ex. 3.

This philosophy of the usefulness of religion was recognized by Voltaire himself, in the famous line on which he is said to have prided himself, that "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one" (Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer).-[Epitre, CXI.: Euvres; Paris ed., 1876: Tom. II. p. 649.

Part of Plutarch's essay on the "Fortune of the Romans" has been lost, but he seems to have expressed his governing thought about the matter in sentences like these, from the portion which we have:—

"I think it may be truly affirmed that, notwithstanding the fierce and lasting wars which have been between Virtue and Fortune, they did both amicably conspire to rear the structure of her [Rome's] vast empire and power, and join their united endeavours to finish the most beautiful work that ever was of human production. . . For want of one supreme ruler over all, while all aspired to rule, the world was filled with unspeakable violence, confusion, and revolution in all things, until such time as Rome was raised to its just strength and greatness, which, comprehending under her power many strange nations, and even transmarine dominions, did lay the foundation of firmness and stability in the greatest of human affairs; for by this vast compass of one and the same empire, government was secured as in an unmovable circle, resting upon the centre of peace. It is manifest to him that will reason aright, that the abundance of success which advanced the Roman empire to such vast power and greatness is not to be attributed to human strength and counsels, but to a certain divine impulse, and a full gale of running Fortune, which carried all before it that hindered the rising glory of the Romans."-[Plutarch: "Morals "; Boston ed., 1874: Vol. 4: pp. 199, 200, 214.

VIII. p. 292.-"Never would the oracle at Delphi have been so