nuclei of churches throughout the newer States and Territories in the great West.

The most prominent deficiencies in the elements of Western character are want of high-toned, stern religious principle, and steady, active, enlarged benevolence. The feelings of honor, the abhorrence of falsehood, and entire frankness of Western character only need to be animated by deep, ardent, and intelligent piety to make us what we ought to be. In the business pursuits and enterprise of mankind there are strong tendencies to selfishness. The benevolent spirit of the gospel, culivated in a high degree, is the antidote.

There is a wide field of honorable usefulness open in this great Valley for enterprising young men. Here they may find unbounded scope for the cultivation of traits that will adorn their own characters, and make them blessings to their country and the world. The destinies of our country, and all that is great and noble for mankind, are, under God, in the hands of this Central Valley. If ever the temple of American liberty is shattered, its stately and beautiful columns thrown down, and in broken and disjointed fragments strown over the land, and our children's children grope amid darkness and despotism, it will be the work of other hands than of the people of the West. In a brief period the people of this Valley will command the political power of this nation. The elements of discord between the North and the South of the old States will be controlled by the conservative power on these waters. A weighty and fearful responsibility rests on us, and from it there will be no shrinking. If the baleful influence of hoary superstition, or the desolating blast of infidelity, ever sweeps over this fair country, on the population here will rest the responsibility in the day of reckoning. If ever the foul spirit of fanaticism divides the American Government, or anarchy tears down the temples of justice, and civil war sweeps away all that is good and lovely from North America, it will only be when the cords of union that bind together these Valley States are rudely severed.

ART. VI. THE HELLENES, ROMANS, AND ISRAELITES.

THEIR POSITION, SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS, IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Translated for the Christian Review, from the Introduction to Trautmann's "Apostolic Church, or Pictures of the Christian Church in the Age of the Apostles."*

THERE is an education, a progressive culture of the human race, dependent not merely on the lapse of ages, but on the appearance from time to time of diverse forms of national spirit and genius. The relation of the individual nations to one another is not accidental, like that of trees in a forest or ears of corn in a field. As each people has its individual character, its peculiar gifts and capacities, so has it also its calling, its destiny, and its appointed time and hour wherein to fulfil this destiny, and to make its contribution to the progressive culture of the race. But there are certain nations appointed to take precedence of others, to stand as the pillars of history, to stamp upon the face of humanity clearly marked and lasting traits. Among these, the Hellenes, (Greeks,) the Romans, and the Israelites, have exerted the most important and enduring influence; and their character and relations must be clearly understood, that we may judge correctly of the foundation laid for the entrance of Christianity into the world.

With the name of the Hellenic race is recalled the noblest and most honored of the nations of antiquity. No other people has ever secured so enduring a renown; and for the reason that this was the fruit, not of conquest, not of the subjugation of other nations, but of long-continued activity in the field of spiritual culture. All liberal and polite culture of the present time, which truly deserves the name, is derived from this people; and indeed in all which pertains to criticism in art and science, Greece still sits as it were in the teacher's chair. Without the aid of the sword she has attained to universal empire; an empire to whose peaceful yoke humanity, especially the races of the West, yields a willing homage; an empire whose influence has never been to degrade, but

Die apostolische Kirche, oder Gemälde der christlichen Kirche zur Zeit der Apostel. Von I. B. Trautmann. Leipz. 1848.

always and everywhere to awaken and to elevate. It was for this people, sprung from a very small beginning, though its declining light glimmered far into Asia as well as Europe, to give the first example, in contrast with the unwieldy vastness of Asia, of the superiority of mental power over the most gigantic developments of physical force. The relative situation and form of its native land is a type of its relative position in humanity, the inherited or self-chosen residence of a people being, according to a universal law, ever the fitting frame to inclose its spiritual lineaments. A peninsula of south-eastern Europe, wedged in between the approaching boundaries of Asia and Africa, in equal proximity to both, it thus indicates the calling, corresponding to the spirit of its people, of spiritual mediator between the East and the West; through whom the occidental nations should come to know and share the science and experience of the Asiatic and North African races, and be educated into the highest refinement and spiritual maturity. In like manner does the infinitely various and diversified formation of its coast and surface symbolize the rich variety, the versatile and elastic character of the Grecian mind. Finally, this finds expression in the physical structure of the Greek himself; which, in an admirably delicate and noble figure and constitution, developed an extraordinary degree of strength and firmness for labor or conflict. In harmony with this, the spiritual nature of the Greek is in the highest degree delicate and noble; delicate in its singular excitability, pliancy, vivacity, gayety and elasticity; noble in its endeavors, peculiar to this people above all others, to rise in its conceptions and aspirations above the necessities of the day and of the sensual existence, and to overcome both by a purely intellectual energy. With this connects itself that curiosity which is the bud of awakening intellectual life, and that restless spirit of inquiry which cannot content itself with the mere outward appearance and use of sensual and visible things, but converts them into materials of thought, asks after their origin, essential nature and connection. Hence the Hellenes have cultivated knowledge into science, and the inquiry and aspiration after wisdom is their peculiar possession.* To this is added that distinguishing gift of the Grecian nature, IDEALITY; that is, the capacity of conceiving the perfect form of whatever appears, or can be made an object of thought, and of representing it, or of bringing the idea into realization. From this

* Comp. Acts xvii. 21; and 1 Cor. i. 22. VOL. XVI.-NO. LXIII.

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springs enthusiasm for all that is great and noble, for the attainment and preservation of the highest possessions of the mind, be it fatherland and freedom, or the pursuit of knowledge; and hence that sense of beauty, so honored and cultivated by the Greeks as justly to be called their "worship of the beautiful." And as science was the product of their rich and powerful intellectuality, so from their idealizing enthusiasm for the beautiful sprang Grecian art, of which the idea of beauty is the essence. By strict adherence to this single idea, Grecian art became free and independent, containing in itself its own end and reward; while in the case of other nations, e. g., the Hindoos and Egyptians, with all their wonderful skill in the mechanical detail, art never became more than a handmaid in the house and service of another,-for the most part, of religion. If works of art among other nations excite our admiration by their colossal, monstrous, symbolical forms, it is through their relation to something apart from themselves, as the Sphinx may in this view properly be called the representative of Egyptian art. In Hellenic art, on the contrary, it is the perfection of form, which in and for itself fills and satisfies the mind. But the Grecian mind achieves its highest triumph in the combination of moral-intellectual aspiration with enthusiasm for the ideal; uniting the beautiful with the good; presenting each as an object satisfying in and for itself, as containing within itself its own end and reward, the one in its essential nature, the other in its form; so that by the union of the two the satisfying essence receives the satisfying form or outward manifestation, the good conferring worth upon the beautiful, the beautiful lending grace to the good.

From all that has been said, we perceive in the Hellenic mind a preponderance of intellectual power and culture, and hence an aspiring after spiritual mastery and independence; a striving, and a capacity for it also, to free itself from the bondage of material nature. While the Oriental, in sluggish indolence or unreflecting devotion; at all events, in unconditional recognition and reverence of the mysterious forces which are with him accounted sacred and divine, slumbers in unconscious harmony with nature, like an embryo in the womb, the Greek seeks, by the aid of his personal and moral consciousness, to penetrate to the essential idea. In him the human soul first comes to itself, becomes aware of an opposition between nature and spirit; the moral self-consciousness awakes as if from slumber to a feeling of individuality, and

of a destiny higher than anything to be realized in the physical life. The moral becomes an object of consciousness,is indeed, by the labor of the understanding, cultivated to an independent science, and ethics take rank with physics. But this lofty sentiment we soon find degenerating with the Greeks into self-conceit, manifested in an excessive over-estimate of individuality, of subjectivity, in a certain haughty feeling of self-reliance. Hence the lack of reverence; hence that familiarity and levity in the contemplation and treatment of religious objects. Those mysterious, colossal, monstrous representations of divinities derived from Egypt and the East, change under the hands of the Hellenes into human forms, refined by art into ideals of human nature. The Isisveil is torn away; and rising from the wild chaos of matter, from the sea-foam, naked and distinct in plastic forms of beauty, the embodied divinities present themselves as Hellenic men, in all respects "like one of us," with every passion and impulse belonging to human nature. Thus Olympus was but a reflection of Greece,-a gallery exhibiting every distinctive trait of Grecian character, only heightened into a nobler beauty by an idealizing fancy. The foreign origin is now scarcely to be traced; the subduing power of Grecian genius has transformed all into its own image. The great master, he who gave to this tendency its full realization, was Homer, the prophet of the system of humanized divinity. From his age and that of Hesiod, the popular religion thus familiarized to the common mind, becomes the field of the poets, and the abyss of fables without limit. The priests, indignant at the profanation, strive to preserve the old myths of tradition in a secret system of doctrine and a secret worship. To counteract the increasing levity of the religion of the poets and the populace, and to secure something wherewith to satisfy the still existing cravings of religious consciousness and feeling, they seek to deduce from the myths, for the most part of very doubtful and obscure contents, a weighty moral significance. This is the origin of the so-called Mysteries. On the other hand, those possessing a finer spiritual sense, to whom the frivolous and childish fables of the popular religion, the dark deceptive teachings and the in part obscene symbolism of the Mysteries, were equally distasteful, sought to win a new field by the exercise of the reasoning faculty. Philosophy awoke,-in a peculiar sense the true offspring of the Grecian mind,-to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, to answer satisfactorily the questions respecting the