many known authors to reject such as not genuine when found in Homer. German criticism is acute, but the English is more sympathetic, humane, and wholesome.

Research, dissection, and criticism have had upon the Homeric poems, as upon the Bible, an effect which none need regret. Little of prehistoric art has come down to us complete. The Hermes of Olympia is the only surviving original of the great period of historic art. But forma mentis eterna. Homer attains an ever higher position. The undergraduate, as with the eyes of the morning, reads him with a dewy freshness of delight; the professor, growing old, ever sees a new charm on familiar objects, as on mountains at sunset. If the poems mock translation it is because the Greek language cannot be duplicated. In reading Dante, though there be many a mighty line, one is perplexed with allegories and allusions. The Homeric poems are as intelligible to the reader of to-day as to the throngs to whom the bard chanted them when, in kings' houses, they had their first hearing. They do not unfold the sacred truth that gives Job and Moses their lofty grandeur. They are human only. Homer, nominis umbra, hands them down from prehistoric gloom. Of their own merit they have lived; of their own merit they are imperishable. Grim Wolf confessed that, even with scalpel in hand, he often surrendered to their poetic charm and felt himself borne on in swift delight along a stream of continuity. One must own that no possible number of ballads, not even the Arthurian, though each in itself be worthy, can any more form an epic than a group of architectural structures can form a Parthenon, with its broad outlines and exquisite details. The general movement-with the deeds and words of both the greater and the lesser personages, and all their traits and turns going on as in a Shakspearian or a Sophoclean drama, inspires the feeling in the reader that the Homeric poems are from one master, whose eye, like that of a shepherd, is upon his wide-ranging flock, and whose voice directs them all, in vale or on hill, by grove or stream of the pasture.

We can but congratulate the student of our day on the ease with which he can comprehend the greatest poet, next to Shakespeare, of all on the fair scroll of literature. Macaulay compared the bleak and meager form of the classics issued four hundred years ago from the Aldine press at Venice with the full, facile

editions which he himself read. Even livelier is the contrast between the Iliad which fifty years ago was in the student's hand and the book which he opens to-day. Scholars of two generations have labored, and he enters into their labors. The text is emended by the best that history, philology, and archæology can offer. Excavations and explorations have cleared up many a phrase and allusion once obscure-the Heræum, the very temple near Mycena on which the poet's eye must at some time have rested, being the most recent recovery. All these sources of accuracy have been opened to the student in the lifetime of men now living. The perfection of the text, the clearness and aptness of annotation, the copiousness of illustration make, as on a mountain side, the climbing a delight, while the summit loses nothing of its glory.

Had Homer been Christian! St. Paul, so runs tradition, going up from Naples to Rome, turned aside at Posilippo to muse at Virgil's tomb. "O quem te fecissem, si noveram te!" came like a groan from the apostle's lips as his great heart felt the poet's pure and lofty genius. Yet must one sigh that so much of the Homeric power is spent on idols which are "nothing in the world?" There is another view to take. In some affecting degree, the whole development of Greek literature belongs to that "mystery of God" whereby he left himself not "without witness" while the fullness of another epoch was slowly coming. There is a glory of the stars, though they fade at the coming of the sun; and that is Homer's own. Besides this, his mythology, though it took from idolatry much of its grossness, is but a part of his achievement. Were it artificial and misleading, enough that cannot be shaken and is noble, tender, beautiful, and true would remain. How can Christianity need, how can it have, an epic? It has Moses and the prophets. It has that marvelous Job, which may be recited or sung. It has the gospels. In all these are recounted the highest possible transactions, with every play of human passion and every phase of human performance. Many a scriptural personage might become the central figure of an epic, were he not so already. To "Javan" and "the isles," as the prophet knew Homer's Ionia and Hellas, it was given to achieve in the night, by the light of stars, a work impossible under the beams of the sun-a work entitling the laborer to say, "We are also his off

spring," and enabling the night to show knowledge to even the golden day.

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For three thousand years all study of Homer has ended in wide and tender reverie, and so it must ever end. matter of the endless dream is Homer himself. clear that our enchanter, like Walter Scott, was first himself enchanted with nature, with gods, and with the ways of men. He was long in training for his work; his vision was quick and clear; he saw the cities of many men and learned their minds; he gathered the choice things of far-floating tradition and of ever-struggling theogony. Then, as his own bees in springtime from blooming fields come freighted to their hollow rock, so he, heavy-laden with treasure, returns to Ionia to walk by the sounding sea and look forth upon the wine-colored deep. Now come the inspiration and the poet's dream. The muse, like the fair woman in Caedmon's vision at Whitby, bids him sing. "What shall I sing?" "Sing the wrath of Achilles!" Nor does the voice divine-Oeia duon-die to silence in his heart until both epics have gushed forth and, flush with the wealth of dimly known but opulent ages, have begun to refresh and fertilize the literature of the world.

A.B. Hyde

ART. V.-MISSIONS AS SEEN AT THE PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS.

DURING the Columbian Exposition it was the writer's privilege to attend seven sessions of the World's Parliament of Religions. In this assembly were gathered, not only representatives of the various divisions of Christianity, but intelligent delegates from the several divisions of heathenism, with many representatives of religions that are neither heathen nor Christian. Never in the history of the world had there been held such a congress. Every man was invited to appear as a “sincere defender of his faith," without fear of inquisition or contradiction. Upon the minds of those who attended the conviction grew strong that Christianity had nothing to fear, but everything to hope; and the Rev. George T. Candlin said, "As a missionary, I anticipate that it will make a new era of missionary enterprise and missionary hope."

I. Much was done to remove misunderstandings. When Christian workers first went among the heathen they were regarded with suspicion or fear. The heathen could not comprehend the motive of their mission or the inspiration that sustained it. They were inclined to believe that missionaries were the creatures of ambition or the mercenary agents of commercial enterprise or the incarnation of vileness bent on destruction. In India all Hindu families are also Hindu in their religion. For this reason the Hindus supposed that all persons in Christian countries were Christian in faith and practice. When they found that men from Christian countries were the unscrupulous agents of commerce or the depraved victims of vice, that they despised law, that they were strangers to justice and the perpetrators of fraud, they inferred that these men were the product of missionary teaching. They therefore misunderstood Christianity, while they supposed that they were judging it by its fruits. They did not know that it was the lack of Christianity that they condemned; and it was interesting in the Parliament of Religions to hear heathen advocates point out what they regarded the defects of Christianity in a spirit of self-defense.

*The World's Parliament of Religions, vol. 1, p. 169.

When the Christian missionary first looks on heathenism he, also, sees it at its worst. He is an observer from the outside, and not from within. The cruel distinctions of caste, the widespread ignorance, the degrading customs, the spirit of sensuality, and the depravities of moral pollution he supposes to be the normal fruit of the religion by which the heathen are known. When, therefore, the missionary speaks severely of a religion that yields such fruits and undertakes to supplant it by Christianity, this is resented on the ground that the fruit of Christianity is also bad.

Until recently the rule has been to show only the contrasts between the Christian religion and others. We have contrasted our light with heathen darkness, our truth with heathen error, our material prosperity with heathen adversity, our emancipated and progressive civilization with heathen bondage to the primitive conditions of social and national life. In making these comparisons we have drawn upon our knowledge of what Christianity is from within, while we have only known the doctrines of the heathen from without. Besides other results, the Parliament greatly aided the Christian and the heathen to see as never before the real antagonisms between Christianity and heathenism. In the future our differences will not be those inspired by mutual animosity, by prejudice, by hatred, and by intolerance; but they will be differences found in the great and fundamental principles that underlie and maintain faith.

II. This ignorance of the East and its religions was openly commented on by the orientals. Thus, they stated that if we knew them we would approach them differently, represent them more fairly, and discover where our faith and theirs reveal a common inspiration and a mutual ground of sympathy. For example, they claimed that we do not understand the meaning of their idols. They say, "Your Roman Catholic Church has material images, and your Protestant Church has mental images, and our idols are only mental images materialized." Manilal N. D'vivedi, a Brahman and a member of the Philosophical Society of Bombay, further declared:

It may be said, without the least fear of contradiction, that no Indian idolater, as such, believes the piece of stone, metal, or wood before his eyes as his God, in any sense of the word. He takes it only as a symbol