d
indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic,
not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the
Madonna, were really representations of what men aimed at producing on
earth, not of what actually had any existence in heaven. And if we look
back at the greatest civilisations of antiquity, we shall find, it is
said, that what gave them vigour and intensity were purely human
interests: and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action
on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.

It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of
which is still felt in the world. Its main stimulus we are told was
frankly human. It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology
had been taken from it. And there, it is said, we see the positive
worth of life; we see already realised what we are now growing to
realise once more. Christianity, with its supernatural aims and objects,
is spoken of as an '_episode of disease and delirium_;' it is a
confusing dream, from which we are at last awaking; and the feelings of
the modern school are expressed in the following sentence of a
distinguished modern writer:[2] '_Just as the traveller_,' he says,
'_who has been worn to the bone by years of weary striving among men of
another skin, suddenly gazes with doubting eyes upon the white face of a
brother, so if we travel backwards in thought over the darker ages of
the history of Europe we at length reach back with such bounding heart
to men who had like hopes with ourselves, and shake hands across that
vast with ... our own spiritual ancestors._'

Nor are the Greeks the only nation whose history is supposed to be thus
so reassuring to us. The early Jews are pointed to, in the same way, as
having felt pre-eminently the dignity of this life, and having yet been
absolutely without any belief in another. But the example, which for us
is perhaps the most forcible of all, is to be found in the history of
Rome, during her years of widest activity. We are told to look at such
men as Cicero or as Caesar--above all to such men as Caesar--and to
remember what a reality life was to them. Caesar certainly had little
religion enough; and what he may have had, played no part in making his
life earnest. He took the world as he found it, as all healthy men have
taken it; and, as it is said, all healthy men will still continue to
take it. Nor was such a life