iddle. It is
through this connection that they receive their most general
significance; for this riddle is the riddle of the race, and the problem
which it involves can be adequately realized only in the life of the
race. To Greece, as peculiarly sensitive to all that is tragical, the
Sphinx connected her questions most intimately with human sorrow, either
in the individual or the household.

"Who is it," thus the riddle ran, "who is it that in the morning creeps
upon all-fours, touching the earth in complete dependence,--and at noon,
grown into the fulness of beauty and strength, walks erect with his face
toward heaven,--but at the going down of the sun, returns again to his
original frailty and dependence?"

This, answered Oedipus, is Man; and most fearfully did he realize it in
his own life! In the mysteries of the Eleusinia there is the same
prominence of human sorrow,--only here the Sphinx propounds her riddle
in its religious phase; and in the change from the _mystae_ to the
_epoptae_, in the revelation of the central self, was the great problem
symbolically realized.

Greece had her reckoning; and to her eye the Sphinx long ago seemed to
plunge herself headlong into precipitate destruction. But this strange
lady is ever reappearing with her awful alternative: they who cannot
solve her riddle must die. It is no trifling account, reader, which we
have with this lady. For now her riddle has grown to fearful
proportions, connecting itself with the rise and fall of empires, with
the dim realm of superstition, with vast systems of philosophy and
faith. And the answer is always the same: "That which hath been is that
which shall be; and that which hath been is named already,--and it is
known that it is Man."

What is it that shall explain the difference between our map of the
world and that of Sesostris or Anaximander? Geological deposits, the
washing away of mountains, and the change of river-courses are certainly
but trifling in such an account. But an Argonautic expedition, a Trojan
siege, a Jewish exodus, Nomadic invasions, and the names of Hanno,
Caesar, William the Conqueror, and Columbus, suggest an explanation. It
is the flux of human life which must account for the flowing outline of
the earth's geography. As with the terrestrial, so with the celestial.
The heavens change by a subtiler movement than the precession of the
equinoxes. In Job, "Behold the height of the stars, how high they are!"
but to Homer t