kind of men we try to draw into our Theosophical Society. We never ask them what their creed is; we do not care. They may worship the god they see in the fire or the sun, or the divinity that for them infuses the substance of a Sivaic Lingam and animates its ultimate atoms; they may search for his glory at Mecca or Jerusalem; in the kâbah, or fire-temple; at Benares or L'hassa; or in the ocean depths or the morning dawn." The meaning of which rhapsody seems to be that, as Colonel Olcott elsewhere puts it, "Religion is most strictly a personal affair; every man makes his own religion and his own god," and so long as he supports the propaganda of the Theosophic faith he may outwardly belong to any other that suits his convenience. In this also the Society copies exactly the Gnostic practice. "It is a common charge," says Mr. King, "of the Fathers against the primitive Gnostics, that they outwardly conformed with out scruple, in order to escape annoyance, to the established religion of whatever place they chanced to inhabit." The Gnostic Basilides, according to St. Irenæus, went even farther, and instructed his followers" to keep themselves individually and personally unknown to common men, and even to deny what they were." I am afraid that I have no space to do more than touch upon the peculiar phraseology used by the chiefs of the Society. But I may perhaps say, that any one who will take the trouble to refer to the works from which I have quoted above will have no difficulty in recognizing in the Gnostic writings nearly every term used by Theosophists which is not, for obvious reasons, expressed in an Oriental language. "The Ideal Thought" (Ennoia) of the Deity, the "Creative Emanations" (probolai), the "Great Deep," and the " right and left hand paths" are thus to be found in St. Irenæus and the Pistis Sophia, while the language in which Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky describe the Adept Brotherhood corresponds with tolerable closeness to the following words of Matter with regard to the Gnostics generally "La seule classe d'initiés qu'on nous fasse connaitre est la plus élévée, celle des élus: qu'on appelait aussi les étrangers à ce monde parce qu'ils étaient les habitués de la region supérieure ou hyperplanetaire." Taking all these facts together, they seem to form a very strong proof that the

system of the Theosophical Society has not been handed down from prehistoric times by secret and mysterious means, but has, on the contrary, been copied en bloc from the relics of Gnosticism. Their pretensions to the contrary argue, perhaps, no very keen sense of morality on the part of the founders; but there is no need to imitate Madame Blavatsky's method of controversy by imputing to them a corrupt motive. motive. The assumption of superhuman knowledge has, in all ages, exercised an almost irresistible fascination over minds of a certain cast; and the extremity of self-deception to which it will carry its victims has been frequently shown. The obstinacy with which certain old women, a few centuries ago, preferred to be burned rather than deny the possession of preternatural powers, is one of the best as well as one of the most often quoted instances of this. There seems hardly any doubt that to this, rather than to any other cause, Gnosticism owed the singular vitality which it displayed during the earlier years of Christianity, and it may well account for what would otherwise appear to be a lack of candor on the part of its modern imitators.

The

It may possibly be thought that this also indicates a prolonged life for the new religion; but those who would thus argue might perhaps overlook a countervailing fact of great weight. Gnosticism had, at the beginning of our era, many points in its favor that it would not now have. existence of a culture founded on a purely aristocratic basis, the tendency of the age to the pursuit of "curious arts" and mysteries of all kinds, and the absence of any scientific objections were but a few of these.

And yet Gnosticism failed, in the long run, to make head against what Mr. King calls "the unity and greater simplicity of Catholicism." One of the chief causes of this was its inherent tendency to split into almost as many sects as it had teachers. "They feel no reverence even toward their own chiefs," says Tertullian, in a somewhat Hibernian passage; "and this is why there are commonly no schisms among heretics, because when there are any they appear not; for their very oneness is schism. It wants, indeed, no deep knowledge of human nature to see that this must of necessity be the case with a faith which claims for a few of its mem

bers a degree of illumination unattainable by the others. There are not wanting signs that the same disintegrating force is at work within the Theosophical Society, and it would not be difficult to show from their writings that its leaders are by no means at one in matters of faith.

It may also be noticed that the Lodges in India outnumber those in the rest of the world by nearly four to one, and that the Indian Lodges seem, from the names of their officers, to be largely composed of Bengalis of the "blameless Babu" stamp. To those who would see in this an indica

CENTURIES of zealous archæology notwithstanding, many phases of the so varied Greek genius are recorded for the modern student in a kind of shorthand only, or not at all. Even for Pausanias, visiting Greece before its direct part in affairs was quite played out, much had perished or grown dim-of its art, of the truth of its outward history, above all of its religion as a credible or practicable thing. And yet Pausanias visits Greece under conditions as favorable for observation as those under which later travellers, Addison or Eustace, proceed to Italy. For him the impress of life in those old Greek cities is not less vivid and entire than that of mediæval Italy to ourselves; at Siena, for instance, with its ancient palaces still in occupation, its public edifices as serviceable as if the old republic had but just now vacated them, the tradition of their primitive worship still unbroken in its churches. Had the opportunities in which Pausanias was fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the antique Greek life unnoticed by him we should have peeped into, minutely systematic in our painstaking! how many a view would broaden out where he notes hardly anything at all on his map of Greece!

One of the most curious phases of Greek civilization which has thus perished for us, and regarding which, as we may fancy, we should have made better use of that old traveller's facilities, is the early Attic deme-life-its picturesque, intensely lo

calized variety, in the hollow or on the spur of mountain or seashore; and with it many an early growth of art parallel to what Vasari records of artistic beginnings in the smaller Italian cities-many a relic of primitive religion. Colonus and Acharnæ, surviving still so vividly by the magic of Sophocles, of Aristophanes, are but isolated documents of a widespread manner of life, in which, amid many provincial peculiarities, the first, yet perhaps the most costly and telling steps were made in all the various departments of Greek culture. Even in the days of Pausanias, Piræus was still traceable as a distinct township, once the possible rival of Athens, with its little old covered market by the seaside, and the symbolical picture of the place visible on the wall. And that is but the type of what there had been to know of threescore and more village communities, having each its own altars, its special worship and place of civic assembly, its trade and crafts, its name drawn from physical peculiarity or famous incident, its body of heroic tradition lingering on, while Athens, the great deme, absorbed more and more of those achievements, passing away almost completely as political factors in the Peloponnesian war, yet still felt, we can hardly doubt, in the actual physiognomy of Greece. That variety in unity, which its singular geographical formation secured to Greece as a whole, was at its utmost in these minute reflections of the national genius, with all the

relish of local difference-new art, new poetry, fresh ventures in political combination, in the conception of life, springing as if straight from the soil, like the thornblossom of early spring in magic lines over all that rocky land. On the other hand, it was just here that ancient habits clung most tenaciously-that old-fashioned, homely, delightful existence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the years of the Peloponnesian war, looked back so fondly. If the impression of Greece generally is but enhanced by the littleness of the physical scene of events intellectually so great-such a system of grand lines, as in one of its fine coins, restrained within so narrow a compass-still more would this be true of those centres of country life. Here, certainly, was that assertion of seem. ingly small interests, which brings into free play, and gives his utmost value to, the individual, making warfare, equally with more peaceful rivalries, deme against deme, the mountain against the plain, the seashore (as in our own old Border life, but played out here by wonderfully gifted people) tangible as a personal history, to the doubling of its fascination for those whose business is with the contemplation of the dramatic side of life.

As with civil matters, so it was also, we may fairly suppose, with religion: the deme-life was a manifestation of religious custom and sentiment, in all their primitive local variety. As Athens, gradually drawing into itself the various elements of provincial culture, developed, with authority, the central religious position, the demes-men did but add the worship of Athena Polias to their own pre-existent ritual uses. Of local and central religion alike, time and circumstance had obliterated much when Pausanias came. A de vout spirit, with religion for his chief interest, eager for the trace of a divine foot step, anxious even in the days of Lucian to deal seriously with what had counted for so much to serious men, he has, indeed, to lament that "Pan is dead :"

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They come no longer!"-" These things happen no longer!" But the Greek, as his very name also, Hellen, was the title of a priesthood, had been religious abundantly, sanctifying every detail of his actual life with the religious idea; and as Pausanias goes on his way he finds many a remnant of that earlier estate of religion, when, as he fancied, it had been

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nearer the gods, was certainly nearer the earth. It is marked, even in decay, with varieties of place; and is not only continuous but in situ. At Phigaleia he makes his offerings to Demeter, agreeably to the paterual rites of the inhabitants, wax, fruit, undressed wool "still full of the sordes of the sheep." A dream from heaven cuts short his notice of the mysteries of Eleusis. He sees the stone, big enough for a little man," on which Silenus was used to sit and rest; at Athens, the tombs of the Amazons, of the purple-haired Nisus, of Deucalion :-" it is a manifest token that he had dwelt there." The worshippers of Poseidon, even at his temple among the hills, might still feel the earth fluctuating beneath their feet. And in care for divine things, he tells us, the Athenians outdid all other Greeks. Even in the days of Nero it revealed itself oddly; and it is natural to suppose that of this temper the demes, as the proper home of conservatism, were exceptionally expressive. Scattered in those remote, romantic villages, among their olives or sea-weeds, lay the heroic graves, the relics, the sacred images, often rude enough amid the delicate tribute of later art; that too oftentimes finding in such retirement its best inspirations, as in some Attic Fiesole. Like a network over the land of gracious poetic tradition, as also of undisturbed ceremonial usage surviving late for those who cared to seek it, the local religions had been never wholly superseded by the worship of the great national temples; were, in truth, the most characteristic developments of a faith essentially earth-born or indigenous.

And how often must the student of fine art, again, wish he had the same sort of knowledge about its earlier growth in Greece, he actually possesses in the case of the Italian. Given any development at all in these matters, there must have been phases of art, which, if immature, were also veritable expressions of power, intermediate discoveries of beauty, such as are by no means a mere anticipation of service only as explaining historically larger subsequent achievements, but of permanent attractiveness in themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of certain amiable artistic qualities. And in regard to Greek art at its best, the Parthenon, no less than to medieval art at its best, the Sistine Chapel, the more instructive light

would be derived rather from what precedes than what follows its central success, from the determination to apprehend the fulfilment of past adventures rather than the eve of decline, in this critical moment which partakes of both. Of such early promise, early achievement, we have in the case of Greek art little to compare with what is extant of the youth of the arts in Italy; while Overbeck's careful gleanings of its history form indeed a sorry relic as compared with the intimations of Vasari regarding the Renaissance. Fired by certain fragments of its earlier days, of a beauty, in truth, absolute, and vainly longing for more, the student of Greek sculpture indulges an ideal of youth ful energy therein, yet withal of youthful self-restraint; and again, as with survivals of old religion, its privileged home, he fancies, must have been in those venerable Attic townships, as to a large extent it passed away with them.

The budding of new art, the survival of old religion, at isolated centres of provincial life, where varieties of human character also were keen, abundant, asserted in correspondingly effective incident-this is what irresistible fancy superinduces on historic details, themselves meagre enough. The sentiment of antiquity is indeed a characteristic of all cultivated people, even in what may seem the freshest ages, and not exclusively a humor of our later world. In the earliest notices about them, as we know, the Attic people are already impressed by the imniense antiquity of their occupation of its soil, of which they are the

very first flower. And we must fancy some at least of those old demes-men sentimentally reluctant to change their habits, fearful of losing too much of themselves in the larger stream of life, clinging to what is antiquated as the work of centralization goes on, needful as that work was, with the great "Eastern difficulty" already ever in the distance. The fear of Asia, barbaric, splendid, hardly known, yet haunting the curious imagination of those who had borrowed thence the art in which they were rapidly excelling it, developing, as we now see, crafts begotten of tyrannic and illiberal luxury in the interest of Greek humanity, was finally to suppress the rivalries of those primitive centres of activity, the "invincible armada" of the common foe coming into sight; as, at a later period, civil strife was

The old hop

to destroy their last traces. lite, from Rhamnus or Acharnæ, pent up in beleaguered Athens during that first summer of the Peloponnesian war, occupying with his household a turret of the wall, as Thucydides describes-one of many picturesque touches in that severe historian-could well remember the ancient provincial life which this conflict with Sparta was bringing to an end. He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity in those Persian ships, coming first as merchantmen, or pirates on occasion, the half-savage, wicked splendors of their decoration, the monstrous figure-heads, their glittering freightage. Men would hardly have trusted their women or children with that suspicious crew, hovering through the dusk. There were soothsayers, indeed, who had long foretold what happened soon after, giving shape to vague, supernatural terrors. And then he had crept from his hiding-place with other lads to go view the enemies' slain at Marathon, beside those belated Spartans, with whom this new war seemed to revive the fierce local feuds of his younger days. Paraloi and Diacrioi had ever been rivals. Very distant it seemed now, with all the stories he could tell; for in those crumbling little towns, as heroic life had lingered on into the actual, so, at an earlier date, the supernatural into the heroic; the last traces of those divine visitors vanishing, like mist at dawn, in retreat from the land, on which, however, they had already begotten our best and oldest families."

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It was Theseus, uncompromising young master of the situation, in fearless application of "the modern spirit" of his day to every phase of life where it was applicable, who, at the expense of Attica, had given Athens a people, reluctant enough, as Plutarch suggests, to desert their homes and religious usages and many good and gracious kings of their own" for this elect youth, who thus figures, passably, as mythic shorthand for civilization, making roads and the like, facilitating travel (how usefully !), suppressing various forms of violence, but many innocent things as well; as must needs be in a world where, even hand in hand with a god-assisted hero, Justice goes blindfold. He slays the bull of Marathon and many another local tyrant, but also exterminates that delightful creature, the Centaur. The Amazon, whom Plato will reinstate as the type

of improved womanhood, has but the luck of Phæa, the sow pig of Crommyon, foul old landed-proprietor. They exerted, however, the prerogative of poetic protest, and survive thereby. Centaur and Amazon, as we see them in the fine art of Greece, represent the regret of Athenians themselves for something that could never be brought to life again, and have their pathos. Those young heroes contending with Amazons on the frieze of the Mausoleum had best make haste with their bloody work, if young people's eyes can tell a true story. A type still of progress triumphant through injustice, set on improving things off the face of the earth, Theseus took occasion to attack the Amazons in their mountain home, not long after their ruinous conflict with Hercules, and hit them when they were down. That greater bully had labored off on the world's highway, carrying with him the official girdle of their queen, gift of Ares, and therewith, it would seem, the mystic secret of their strength; for, at sight of this new foe, she came to a strange submission: the savage virgin had turned to very woman, and was presently a willing slave, returning on the gayly appointed ship in all haste to Athens, where in supposed wedlock she bore King Theseus a son.

With their annual visit to the-to the Gargareans for the purpose of maintaining their species, parting with their boys early, these husbandless women could hardly be supposed a very happy, certainly not a very joyous people; figure rather as a sorry measure of the luck of the female sex in taking a hard natural law into their own hands, and by abnegation of all tender companionship making shift with bare independence, as a kind of secondbest-the best practicable by them in the imperfect actual condition of things. But the heart-strings would ache still where the breast had been cut away. The sisters of Antiope had come, not immediately, but in careful array of battle, to bring back the captive. All along the weary roads from the Caucasus to Attica, their traces had remained in the great graves of those who died by the way. Against the little remnant, carrying on the fight to the very midst of Athens, Antiope herself had turned, all other thoughts transformed now into wild idolatry of her hero. Superstitious, or in real regret, the Athenians never forgot their tombs. As for Anti

ope, the conscience of her perfidy remained with her, adding the pang of remorse to her own desertion, when King Theseus, with his accustomed bad faith to women, set her, too, aside in turn. Phædra, the true wife, was already there, peeping suspiciously at her rival; and even as she yielded to her lord's embraces the thought had come that a male child might be the instrument of her anger, and one day judge her cause.

In one of those doomed, decaying villages, then, King Theseus placed the woman and her babe, hidden, yet safe still within the Attic border, as men veil their mistakes or crimes. They might pass away, they and their story, together with the memory of other antiquated creatures of such places, who had had connubial dealings with the stars. The white, paved wagon-track, a by-path of the sacred way to Eleusis, zigzagged through sloping oliveyards, from the plain of silvered blue, with Athens building in the distance, and passed the door of the rude stone house, furnished scantily, no one had ventured to inhabit of late years till they came there. On the ledges of the gray cliffs above the laurel groves, stem and foliage of motion. less bronze had spread their tents. Travellers bound northward were glad to repose themselves at The Notch, and take directions, or provision for their journey onward, from the highland people, who descended hither to sell their honey, their cheese, and woollen stuff, in the tiny market-place. At dawn the great stars seemed to halt awhile, burning as if for sacrifice to some pure deity, on those distant, obscurely named heights, like broken swords, the rim of the world. A little later you could just see the newly opened quarries, like streaks of snow on their russet-brown bosoms. Thither in spring-time all eyes turned from Athens devoutly, intent till the first shaft of lightning gave signal for the departure of the sacred ship to Delos. Racing over those rocky surfaces, the virgin air descended hither with the secret of profound sleep, as the child lay in his cubicle hewn in the stone, the white fleeces heaped warmly round him. In the wild Amazon's soul, to her surprise, and at first against her will, the maternal sense had quickened from the moment of his conception, and (that burst of angry tears with which she had received him into the world once dried up) kindling more eager