THE RITUALISTS OF ANTIQUITY.* Is one brief sentence, the author

of the very remarkable treatise now before us thus sums up the result of his elaborate and scholarly researches :—" The victory of Christianity marks the end of ancient Society." Those who are but superficially acquainted with this victory would be ready to interpret this language as if it was intended to remind us, that the special contrast between ancient Society and that of Europe, under Christian enlighten- ment, was this,—that whereas our Pagan Aryan predecessors in Greece and Rome lived their lives, and built up their customs and institutions, on the lines of purely secular convenience, we

• The Ancient City: a Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome. By Fuetel de Oonlanges. Translated from the latest French edition by Willard Small. Boston: Lee and Shepard. 1874.

moderns have erected our social fabrics with a constant reference to the higher claims of religion. The exact converse of this conception is the proposition which M. de Coulangea has not only suggested, but so far as historical proof is concerned, has demonstrated, in the present volume, in the city of antiquity —in Athens, for instance, and in Rome—religion embraced the entire area of human life, dominating with the same exclusive authority in private as in public affairs. The hint which

as early as 1813 Bunsen threw out on the law of inheritance among the Athenians has become, under the manipulation of M. de Con- langes, a luminous and illuminating theory ; and he, better than any other inquirer whom the present writer can at the moment recollect, has brought out into strong relief a second peculiarity which differentiates Christianity from all foregoing creeds, and which is this,—that it does not claim to be a source of law, but is, in the first instance, an appeal to the heart and conscience of t' e individual man. In the old world, Religion made the law, and the law bound the man from the cradle to the grave. Christianity gives to man a new freedom, a new inspiration, and says :—Make such arrangements in all the departments of social life as will best give room for the noblest style of character. It renovates the world by planting its forces outside of it.

It was not the Athenians only who were "too superstitious." Of course, everybody knows that these last words are a bad rendering of St. Paul's meaning. But if St. Paul was, shall we say, too much of a gentleman, or had too much tact and delicacy, to allow him to make a statement in the very opening of his address which would shock the prejudices or affront the amour-propre of his auditors, there is a vast amount of correspondence with fact in our English translation. Among the elder Greeks and Romans alike, there was not a single act of public life in which the gods were not believed to take a part, and our very word inaugurate remains to remind us that the citizen of former days never durst initiate any action without the belief that the gods were on his side. On certain days held to be unpropitious there were no assemblies, no courts, and public life was suspended. In Rome, as in Athens, before an assembly proceeded to business, the most solemn and punctilious religious acts were performed. The Roman Senate always met in a temple, for if a session had been held elsewhere than in a sacred place, its acts would have been pronounced to be null and void, as the gods could not have been present. Anterior to all deliberation, sacrifice was offered and prayer pronounced, and each senator on entering had to approach the altar, present his offering, and invoke the protecting deities. In Athens similar customs were observed. Here the hall of assembly had its altar and its sacred fire, priests offered sacrifice, a large circle was traced by pouring lustral water on the ground, and within this sacred circle the citizens assembled. During war, no leas than in peace, religion was the controlling power, and the army in the field was only the city in arms, attended and shielded by its sacred symbols. Every Greek or Roman army carried with it a hearth on which the holy fire was kept up night and day, and while the Roman forces were followed by the augurs and chicken- feeders, the Greeks had their special diviners. In confirmation of these sentences, in which we have been summarising the statements

of M. do Coulanges, our author adds :— •

" Lot us examine a Roman army at the moment when it is preparing for battle. The Consul orders a victim to be brought, and strikes it with the axe : it falls: its entrails will indicate the will of the gods. An aruspex examines them, and if the signs are favourable, the Consul gives the signal for battle. The most skilful dispositions, the most favourable circumstances, are of no account, if the gods do not permit the battle. The fundamental principle of the military art among the Romans was to be able to put off a battle when the gods wore opposed to it. It was for this reason that they made a sort of citadel of their camp every day."

"Let us now examine a Greek army, and we will take, for example, the one engaged in the battle of Platen. The Spartans aro drawn up in line—each one has his post for battle. They all have crowns upon their heads and the flute-players sound the religious hymns. The King, a little in the rear of the ranks, slaughters the victims. But the entrails do not give the favourable signs, and the sacrifice must be re- peated. Two, three, four victims are successively immolated. During this time tho Persian cavalry approach, shoot their arrows, and kill a large number of Spartans. The Spartans remain immovable, their shields placed at their feet, without oven putting themselves on the de- fensive against the arrows of the enemy. They await the signal of the gods. At last the victims offer the favourable signs ; thon the Spartans raise their shields, sefze their swords, move on to battle, and are victorious."

We do not mean to charge all the older inhabitants of Rome or Athens with the grovelling fears which dominated the "super- stitious man" in the times of Plutarch, and we all know that, at least in Roman history, there came a time when to the philosopher all religions were equally false, to the populace equally true, and to the statesman equally useful.

Nevertheless, the religion that prevailed in the ancient cities might be described as a "reign of terror." With us Christians, religion in its profoundest sense is culture—an expression which the present writer did not borrow either from Emerson or Matthew Arnold—and the ultimate power of Christianity is 'lodged in the inspiration which it brings to us for the cultivation of the noblest faculties of our nature. We believe, as Christians, in a living Will of absolute Righteousness and Charity, and this faith inevitably surrenders the subject of it to the fellowship, indeed, of a Holy Spirit. By Christianity we are brought nigh to God, in order that our lives may become God-like. We say, further, as Chris- tians, that if "in the knowledge of God stands our eternal life," "His service is perfect freedom."

By the phrase "divine service," again, the Christian who has obtained his Christianity from the New Testament does not mean to express the notion that we must "do something" for God Almighty, but the very different conception that the life of each man is to be a self-consecration to truth and goodness. The very ritual of Christianity is good works. In his most ideal mood, St. John saw no temple made with hands amongst Christian worshippers. Their adoration was uttered in the great fact that they were ever treading in his footsteps who was the Lamb of God, and who laid down his life for the world ; while the Seer farther intimates that in this life of ceaseless ministration to others, the followers of Christ found that fountains of living waters were springing up in their own souls. If we turn now to the chapter of M. de Coulanges, on the rites and annals of the ancient city, we shall find a wonderful contrast to this ideal worship, and that it was not the Jews only Who were in bondage to the minute prescriptions of a fretting ceremonial, The old Greek and the old Roman was a ritualist who passed his life in fear and trembling. Man, says M. de Coulariges, cpunted little on the friendship of his gods, who -were envious and irritable and of like passions with himself. He was continually afraid lest even his domestic and national gods might betray him ; his constant anxiety was not to incur their displeasure. But how please them, how tell that the offering or the worship was, in theological phraseology, "satisfactory ?" It was believed that certain formulm were quite magical in their efficacy. A certain prayer couched in certain terms had on one occasion been followed by the event that was desired. The experiment, tO be suc- cessful in any future emergency, must be repeated to the minut- est detail, and hence, the words which proved so potent that the gods could not resist them, must be scrupulously preserved and handed down from father to son, and when letters were intro- duced, they were committed to writing. But if the words of the charm were of the greatest consequence, not less important were the vestment and attitude of the worshipper. Mr. Mackonochie himself might be schooled by the old Romans, and not only by the modern ones. In addressing one god the head had to be veiled, another required that the head should be uncovered ; to propiti- ate a third, it was necessary that the toga should be thrown over the shoulder ; while there were certain prayers which lost all their virtue unless the petitioner, after pronouncing them, pirouetted on one foot from left to right !

We are greatly occupied just at this present with the question of Rubrics, and we know the huge scandal which poor Archbishop Laud occasioned in Scotland when he introduced into the Scottish Liturgy the prescription, which induced his Scotch assailants to say, "It importeth much that the priest must stand with his hinder parts to the people ;" but as we have implied above, it was not in the senate, or in the solemn temple, or on the battle-field, or in the great triumphal procession—such as one can still see exquisitely represented in the Roman Capitol—or on his marriage- day, that the old Roman gentleman, before the Plebs surged up into power, was tied and bound by rubrical chains. The "trivial round" of his daily life was haunted at every turn. He never left his bowie without painfully observing whether any bird of evil omen was in sight, arid he had to be careful always to step out of it with the right foot foremost. He never would have his hair cut except at full moon. There were certain words which he durst not for his life pronounce, he carried amulets about his person, and while he knew of specific formulw for avoiding sicknekr, he had to repeat these twenty-seven times, and spit in a prescribed fashion at each time of repetition.

As yet we have been speaking only of the religious habits of the Eupatrid in Athens and of the Patrician in Rome, and the ques- tion naturally arises as to the origin of the religion which held in its inexorable grasp "the upper ten" or upper " three " in the ancient city.. But it must be observed that, under all its changes of government, to keep here by the Roman element of history,

the State was the supreme authority, and that until the conversion of Constantine, so called, Rome herself was the first and great commandment for the Roman. The plebeian only claimed to be -st Roman citizen, instead of a pariah, the conquered municipality only craved to be in full and equal alliance with the victorious city. And what was the city, and how had it grown and acquired its power and prestige? A line of Horace supplies the answer to this lairt question :—"Thou [Rome] bearest rule because of thy subjection to the gods : Viz te minorem quod seris imperas."

We, of course, are quite at liberty to question whether the supremacy of Rome is to be ascribed to her piety, but her ancient institutions are quite unintelligible without taking this piety into special account. In strict speech, the patrician constitution of ancient Rome might be defined as a priestly one ; and this con- stitution gradually evolved itself out of the union of the three great tribes whose distinguishing characteristic, oddly as the phrase may sound in modern ears, was the possession of "family worship." What this family worship was a few sentences will suffice to show. It was based, first of all, on the belief in the im- mortality of man. The old Hebrew plaintively, nay, passionately, claimed exemption, for a season, from death, because, to him, death seemed the burial of all hope, of all possible activity in the service of Jehovah ; although it was from Hebrew missionaries that we Westerns have been "begotten again to a lively hope " of an inheritance beyond the tomb. But the Aryan, Greek, and Roman, in this agreeing-with the Turanian—whether the Etruscans were Turanians or not does not matter here—never entertained any doubt as to the continued existence of the departed. It was not in the separate, undying life of what we call "the soul" that the first grey fathers of Rome believed. The man himself, whose body they put in the grave, lived on, in their imagination, in his place of interment ; and the Dean of Westminster was perfectly justified, from pagan sources, in using the preposition coram in his much questioned "epitaph." The old Romans, at the close of the funeral obsequies, called thrice on the name of the dead. They wished that he might live happy underground. They uttered, as- in his hearing, the solemn "Vale." They in- scribed on the tomb that the man himself rested beneath. They buried with him clothes, utensils, and arms. Wine was poured out over his grave to quench his thirst,- and food was placed beside him to satisfy his hunger. Nay, more, horses and slaves were freely slaughtered to serve him in the under-world ; and even the beautiful captive, to select here a Greek instance, must be given up to the dead Achilles. To add one other Greek illus- tration, Plutarch informs us that he personally witnessed the six- hundredth anniversary of the reverent offering of wine, oil, milk, perfumes, and a sacrificed victim to the soldiers who had fallen on the battle-field of Platma. It was not merely, however, a belief in the still on-going life of the dead which originated, or, at all events, sustained these remarkable rites. The dead themselves were the direct objects of worship, and the fire on the hearth of the family of the deceased was at once the witness of the woiship paid to him, and the indispensable element for securing his favour and protection. With him all the meals were shared. Truly, as M. de Coulanges observes, this was an old belief ; but Horace, Ovid, and Petronius still supped before their fires, poured out libations, and addressed prayers to them. The Romans, no doubt, were fire-worshippers,—ia due course of time, the rites which had secured the favour and assist- ance of their departed ancestors to the individual family being by the consent of the tribes transferred to a common public deity,—that of Vesta, or the Fire, whose virgins, as everybody knows, were the most sacred personalities in Rome. In all public sacrifices, even in those offered to Zeus or Athene, the first invocation was always addressed to the fire. The great veneration for the sacred fire waned in Greece at a very early period, but it never became enfeebled at Rome. In the days of Ovid at Rome, as in India in the time of the Brah- mins, the hearth-fire took precedence of all other deities ; not that Jupiter and Brahma had not acquired a greater importance in the religion of man, but it must still be remembered that these were gods of a later origin, ]ater, and• of an inferior order, too, for, as M. de Coulanges has been careful to point out, there is no doubt whatever that the antique worship of the dead and of the domestic fire was, at least, indirectly a protection against the adoration of anything lower than man, or of any exiatence or object which was circumscribed within the limits of merely phy- sics1 phenomena, since it was the recognition of the immortal and supernatural principle in man himself. Man, however, could not rise above himself, unassisted. He could substi- tute, gradually, public interest, the interest of the city, or of

the Empire, above the old caste-sanctions of religion. Poli- tical power was taken from the Kings, the right of primogeniture disappeared, the Clients were freed, the Plebs—the unholy masses —at last entered the city with their terrible Tribune, and philo- sophy introduced new rules and principles of political well- being ; but still the old religious forms and rites were retained, there were still "lords many and gods many," and the State being omnipotent, individual liberty was utterly unknown. The legendary fires which /Eneas the Pious brought from Troy were still burning, but burning amidst the most dismal dissolution of the virtues and purity of social life, when a very ams1l company of obscure men and women accepted with enthusiasm a simple message which had come to them from an Asiatic province. The acceptance of this message was the beginning of the end. Reli- gion, which was then a source of division and of war, be came the ground of union and the bond of peace. The soul had ceased to have a country, save in the heaven of an all-embracing love. There was another King than Cream, for Christ had said : —" Render unto Cmsar the things which are Cmsar's, but unto God the things which are God's." Mankind had taken the place of Greek, Roman, or Jew. There had come a new heaven, and in due time the whole face of the earth must be renewed also.

There is nothing exactly novel in the contents of this volume, but to us the work itself is unique, in revealing the whole frame- work of antique society to have been pervaded by the religious element ; while as a guide to students in tracing the development and successive revolutions of political existence in "the ancient city," it is altogether admilable. It is a clear, coherent, masterly, and exhaustive treatise, and the present translation is a very satisfac- tory rendering of the original, though lacking here and there the brilliancy and " points " of the erudite Frenchman.