for the glory of His name and as a light to the nations.

The priest-prophet, Ezekiel, saw Israel's restoration as a people cleansed and sanctified, upon repentance, loathing themselves for their abominations. Others gave voice to the hope of mankind redeemed through Israel, and resolved anew the chequered tear-stained relationship between righteousness and prosperity. These were mysteries, to be reconciled with the universal power and righteousness of God.

In that providential exile, Israel learned, or certain Israelites learned, spiritual wisdom through suffering, and gave wonderful expression to their faith in Jehovah's love. With decades of servitude in a foreign land, the thought came to these partial slaves that it might be as Jehovah's bruised and suffering servant, pre-eminently serving His other servants, that Israel should be redeemed. Thoughts struggled upward of a service of universal mediation, and of atonement through suffering, even for other sinful peoples. With this consecration came assurance of forgiveness, and of Jehovah's peace and presence in an Israel, redeemed, restored, and sanctified through service and atonement. If Jehovah had bruised His servant, making him to bear the guilt of many, He, Jehovah, had been afflicted in all the afflictions of His people, and so had drawn His servant within His passionate redemptive purpose of suffering, the suffering that

shall make many righteous. Magnificently and with a tumult of exultation, these thoughts are set forth in exilic portions of the book of Isaiah.

In intimate comfortings, the servant holds to God, is enfolded in His presence. Within the scope of this assurance lie his peace and freedom. But it is the Psalter that, supplementing the visions of the prophets, utters the many phases of sorrow and inalienable comfort filling the consciousness of man before his God, and voices the manifold realization of the relationship between God and man:

Like as the hart which panteth after the water-brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God.

For countless millions, Confucianism was to be a rule of life, a way of freedom within a voluntary harmony of beneficent observance; India, through the intense disgust of its high thinkers for the changing world, and their goal so difficult for us to think, was likewise to afford a way to freedom for countless millions. In Israel the prophets held themselves the spokesmen of Jehovah; they were not conscious of acting after their own judgement or the decisions of their own free will. Yet how had God delivered His commands to Elijah? Not through the violent wind or crashing storm or earthquake, emblems of force, but in a still small voice, the symbol of persuasion; and Elijah's response lay in voluntary obedience. In reality, under divine suggestion, the Hebrew prophets follow their free

intelligence. So the Psalms utter the ardent religious desire wholly to submit the singer's will, nay, his whole being and desire, to God. The human will seeks refuge in the will of God, but still voluntarily.

IV

GREECE

It was the lot of Greece to assemble the free energies of man, insist upon both the action and the value of the full round of human faculty and trait, and test each element of life in the crucible of thought. No other people used with such free discrimination their self-reliant minds to ascertain and establish the elements of human well-being; and no other people, through consciously advancing thought, proceeded so clearly to select the best. They seem to create a harmony of beauty, wherein that which was most fair should show in its true human dignity.

The Greek conception of human well-being, of happiness, was that which Plato realized, and Aristotle expressed in final analysis. It consisted in the free and unimpeded exercise of human function, leading on to the attainment of man's furthest actuality, the most complete fulfilment of himself. Before Aristotle spoke or Plato lived, many a Greek had lived out this principle according to his impulses and dominant desires, with such

discrimination as was in him; or had achieved it in the expression of beauty and wisdom through art and poetry; or had seen the goal of its fulfilment along the way of knowledge and reflection. It meant the actualization of the manifold contents of life.

The manifold of Greek life drew unity from the Hellenic temperament and the recognition of Hellenic principles. Yet the divergent impulses within this manifold were keenly felt and ardently pursued. Life's different phases were beautifully expressed in actual achievement, or in words or sculpture. Let us consider the controlling unity and then the types of diverging impulse and attainment.

From the first clear expression of the Hellenic genius in the Homeric epics, the Greeks appear pre-eminently endowed with the faculty of reason: not the dialectic metaphysical faculty, which created the philosophy of India, but a faculty as broad as life, and equipped with keen perceptions of all things taking place on earth, yet focussed always upon the greatness and the mortal limitations of men. The epic heroes, Achilles or Odysseus, never cease to reason or to present in reason their conduct and resolves. The gift of reason, and the habit of reasoning plausibly or fairly, persist through all Greek life and literature.

These clear perceptions and this gift of reason were possessed by men vibrant with desire. Eagerly

and passionately the Greeks desired life, its full content, its gladness and exultings, its successes, the beauty of its endeavours and achievements; and they were endowed with curiosity; they wished to know. Their nature was intellectual.

Perception, reason, a searching intelligence illumined Greek desire, checked it or urged it on, moulded it, and through rational guidance raised it to objects most truly and nobly human. Reason marshalled the objects of desire according to their value in human life, and thus brought order and proportion to the individual life whose desires were its springs of action.

Impulsively as well as with their minds, the Greeks loved beauty, beauty of form, beauty of language, beauty of conduct. The love of beauty pervaded Greek life and thought. It permeated the whole round of desire included in the Greek nature; it joined with the Greek reason, and conformed to the guidance of the Greek intelligence. Thus made part of the Greek reason, the love of beauty became ordered, whole, consistent, intellectual. It formed the final element in the proportionment of all things desirable; it emerges as life's harmony and perfection, co-ordinate with the good. The thought of beauty as fitness, proportion, pervaded Greek principles of conduct, fashioned the famous motto undèv ayav, nothing too much, and entered the finely conceived virtue of σωφροσύνη, which is the temperance of wisdom.