THE PRINCIPLES OF THE GRECIAN PHILOSOPHY. [PART I.] ON THE STATE OF RELIGIOUS AND MORAL PRIN INTRODUCTION. IN comparing the moral maxims of the heathen world with those of revelation, which is the object of this work, it is desirable to go as far back as we can, with any sufficient evidence, of what men really thought and did; and though with respect to Greece we cannot go so far back as we can with respect to Hindostan, and other oriental nations, we have two early writers on whom we may depend, viz. the poets HESIOD and HOMER; and they flourished, according to Newton, about eight hundred years before the christian æra ; A. We We have also a poem of considerable length, containing precepts for the conduct of life, by THEOGNIS, which does not appear to have suffered by interpolation; and he flourished more than four hundred years before Christ; and also a shorter poem of PHOCYLIDES of the same age, thought by some to contain christian sentiments, and therefore to have been interpolated; we have also a collection of sayings of those who are generally called the seven wise men of Greece, who lived about six hundred years before Christ, preserved by Diogenes Laertius. Though all these are not of equal authority, I shall quote nothing from any of them but what will appear, by a comparison with others the antiquity of which is unquestionable, to be sufficiently to my purpose. It is something remarkable that, near as Greece is to Palestine and Egypt, not only all science, pro perly so called, but a knowledge of the common and most useful arts, seems to have been unknown for ages in that country, till they were brought to them by the Phenicians or Egyptians, who came among them to find settlements, after flying from their own countries, and who found them in a state of the greatest barbarism, and divided into a great number number of clans; for nations or states they did not deserve to be called; and in a state of hostility with each other, as mankind in a similar situation are always found to be. These wandering tribes of Greece, similar to those in North America at present (for they were a long time in no better, but rather in a worse state with respect to civilization,) must no doubt, have had some notions of religion; since no people in the Iworld have been intirely without them; but what they were in that rude state of the country it is im possible to trade. The sacred rites and modes of worship that we find accounts of in their writers were acknowledged to have been borrowed from Egypt, and other countries. And even this was in so early a period, before they had any writers, that the observance of them had been from time immemorial; so that the veneration they had acquired from their antiquity was not to be shaken. Whatever they were, and they were different in every part of the country, and more or less in every different town and hamlet, they were supposed to be connected with the well-being of the place; so that it would have been thought hazardous to make any change in them. Nor do we find that this was A 2. ever |