given in them, and up to 1906 no one could enter the public service or be promoted in it without passing a thorough examination on their contents. In Japan

and Korea the authority of Confucius among the educated classes, until the last few years, was almost as unquestioned as in his native land. He has been "during twenty-three centuries the daily teacher and guide of a third of the human race."

Confucianism inculcates many of the characteristics of a genuine religious life, such as reverence for the past, love of knowledge, regard for peace and order, and filial piety. But what it vitally needs is a larger outlook. It needs to supplement regard for the past with hope for the future, its stability with the idea of progress, its faith in man with faith in a Higher Power, its appreciation of time with an equal appreciation of eternity.

e. The Iliad and the Theogony of the Greeks. -The chief Sacred Scriptures of the ancient Greeks were the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, and the Theogony of Hesiod. For this statement we have the explicit assertion of no less an authority than Herodotus himself. He says distinctly, "I am of the opinion that Hesiod and Homer lived four hundred years before my time and not more, and these were they who framed a theogony for the Greeks, and gave names to the gods, and assigned to them honors and arts, and declared their several forms" (ii., 53).

This is also the view of the latest scholars. Professor Seymour of Yale in his commentary upon the Homeric poems declares, "To the ancient Greek mind, the Iliad and Odyssey formed a sort of Bible, to which reference was made as to an ultimate authority." He would undoubtedly have included in this statement the

Theogony of Hesiod, if occasion had called for any reference to that work.

To the student of ancient history it is no accident that the revealers of the ways of the gods among the Greeks were poets. For poets were looked upon by them as equal to prophets, and no such distinction was made between them as we are inclined to make in our day. Everything in nature and life they instinctively regarded from the poetic point of view. To the Greeks, as James Freeman Clarke has so well said in his Ten Great Religions: "all the phenomena of nature, all the events of life became a marvellous tissue of divine story. They walked the earth surrounded and overshadowed by heavenly attendants and supernatural Their gods were not their terror, but their delight. Even the great gods of Olympus were around them as invisible companions. Fate itself, the dark Moira, supreme power, mistress of gods and men, was met manfully and not timorously. So strong was the human element, the sense of personal dignity and freedom, that the Greeks lived in the midst of a supernatural world on equal terms."

powers.

The question of the origin of the Greek religion was a mooted one even among the Greeks themselves, and continued to be so until very recent times. Some held that it was almost entirely an Egyptian importation, while others regarded it as a native product. The advances that have been made within the last half-century in comparative philology have, however, settled the matter beyond reasonable doubt. Recent scholars tell us that over two thousand words in the Greek language are found in the Sanskrit, showing conclusively that the Greek people once lived in Central Asia and brought the rudiments of their religion with them

when they migrated from that country. Later additions were made to it by other colonists from Phoenicia, Egypt, and other parts of the East.

To Homer and Hesiod belongs the honor of making the first attempt to put these early traditions into permanent form and bring them down to their own day. But who Homer was is regarded by modern scholars as an unsolved mystery. "When and where Homer lived," says a high authority, "no one knows. Many stories about him were invented and told, but all are without support," the one about his blindness being the most unlikely of all. His knowledge of anatomy and of the details of battles, for example, could not have been acquired by one deprived of the power of sight.

Indeed, it is now agreed that the poems attributed to Homer by the ancients were not written by any one person; for they do not have the unity we find in such works as Vergil's Æneid and Milton's Paradise Lost. Some parts of the Iliad are shown by scholars to be much more ancient than was formerly supposed, and some much more recent. Oftentimes the details of the story are not known to the writer, for he is constantly appealing to the inspiration of a Muse for his facts. That there was a conflict between the ancient Greeks and Trojans, and that Troy was destroyed about 1180 B.C. has been made quite probable by the excavations of Dr. Schliemann since 1869, showing that towns of wealth and culture like those described in the poem, existed in the region of Mycena and Ilium at that time.

The Iliad opens with the visit of an old priest of Apollo to the camp of the Greeks, offering rich ransom for his daughter whom they have captured and given as a prize to one of their chieftains. It is the tenth year of the war to compel Paris, the son of King Priam

of Ilium, to return Helen, the daughter of the goddess Leda and Father Zeus, to her husband, the King of Sparta. For from him Paris had stolen her with the help of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. As the Greeks had brought no supplies with them they lived by plunder upon the neighboring towns, slaying the men or selling them into slavery and taking the women prisoners. The daughter of this priest had been taken in this way. Her captor rudely dismisses the supplication of her father, and Apollo sends a pestilence upon the Greeks in consequence.

As soon as the cause of the pestilence becomes known the daughter is restored in order to win back the divine favor. Later the Trojans break into the Grecian camp and work great slaughter, but finally they are driven back and Hector is slain, the noblest son of Priam. The Iliad closes with an account of the ransom and burial of Hector. The action of the Iliad lasts only six weeks, but the characteristics and relationships of most of the principal gods and goddesses are vividly depicted in the book notwithstanding this fact.

The Odyssey gives a description of the wanderings and hardships of Odysseus or Ulysses after leaving Troy on his way home. Owing to the ill will of the god Poseidon he is helplessly driven about for the period of ten years from one country to another in various parts of the world. At first he comes to the land of the Lotus-eaters, then to the island of the Cyclops, one of whom devours six of his comrades. Later another race of giants destroys most of his ships. Finally he is cast upon the island of a sea-nymph who cares for him till the goddess Athene persuades Father Zeus to allow his return home. After many further trials and sufferings he reaches his native shore. By the help of his son,

whom he had left twenty years before as an infant, he slays the insolent suitors of his wife and regains his kingdom.

While there is a universal agreement among scholars that these Homeric poems are the oldest works of Greek literature that have come down to us, none of them hold that they are the oldest poems that the Greeks produced. Brief lyrics on various themes such as love and war, and short epics celebrating the deeds of the gods and the exploits of famous men must have been long in circulation among the people before any poet thought of composing such extended works as these. So far from being the pure creations of the age of Homer, they are universally regarded as consisting chiefly of a body of myths and legends that had descended from earlier times. Even the language and verse are inheritances from former generations.

Of the personality of Hesiod, the author of the Theogony, there seems to be no doubt. He himself tells us that he was born in the little village of "Ascra, in winter vile, in summer most villainous, and at no time glorious. Here it was that he fed his lambs beneath divine Helicon. Here, as he says, "the Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Jove, breathed into me a voice divine that I might sing of both the future and the past, and they bade me hymn the race of everliving blessed gods."

The message he

Hesiod is essentially a prophet. delivers he declares is not from himself. He did not discover by his own researches the truths he proclaims. He thinks of himself as simply the mouthpiece of the Muses. As another has expressed it, "Personal opinion and feeling may tinge his utterance, but they do not determine its general complexion." He is in his