CHAPTER VIII. UTTERING THE WORDS OF POWER. How names, and especially the seven names so intimately bound up with the Promise and the Promised One, could be concealed and still kept prominently before the eye and ear, has been explained and illustrated in the preceding chapter. A careful perusal of the examples given in it shows how easy it was for one class of readers, biased by Pagan ideas and false intent, to interpret the poets after a fashion of its own; and for another class, trained in religious truth and watchful of the hidden names, to construe them in quite a different manner. The same painstaking and ingenious diction, the same deceitful pauses and choice of words, and especially the same inner application of certain terms, that enabled the poets to defy the veto as regards the Name, enabled them to defy it in dwelling upon and invoking the Almighty, in mapping out the principal incidents connected with the coming, life, and death of our Lord, and in giving us incidentally an insight into the deep piety with which they were inspired, the difficulties and dangers under which they wrote, and the artificial language which they were compelled to have recourse to. The second chapter of this work closed with the remark that an ultra proof of Paganism on the part of the poets is furnished by an invocation of Aratus addressed to Zeus. There are many other similar invocations-some to Zeus, some to Apollo-besides this of Aratus: they are found in Homer, Hesiod, the Tragedians, the Latin epics; and while one and all breathe admittedly of the sublime and pure, they are addressed to those deities, and thus furnish (it is said) a basis for belief in the pantheistic tendencies of the writers. The weight and worth of such a saying must be measured in the scales of intent; and the balance so long used by say-mongers for testing the poets has been found so far to be wondrously defective and out of order. It would be well, then, to change our scales: to do so, we have only to change "the intent"—and in doing this, we will have done much. Is it abso lutely necessary, in professing our Maker, to say eó; or Deus, or God? Is "my unfailing hope" idolatrous? Is "Spirit! whose life-sustaining presence fills" pantheistic? Is "the great Physician" pagan? But we know to whom they apply. Just so; and so did Aratus and Homer and all others know to whom was applicable such a term as Zeus and Apollo. Let us review a portion of what has already been written. It was pointed out how the nations of old, tiring of the truth, demanded Gods from their priests-how the priests, yielding to the cry, gave them for deities the philosophical abstractions and scientific entities that had been culled from what was originally written in "The Science of religion"-how from this innocent nomenclature there emanated a Pagan worship (gross and sensual in some cases, refined and mild in others) that had, as a rule, two principal deities, symbolical of “life” and “light”—how, in the Greek worship, those two were respectively called Zeus and Apollo— and how, though the deistic notion regarding those overshadowed the symbolical one in the minds of the unlettered vulgar, the reverse was true in the case of the educated sceptics. To these last Zeus was only "life"; a mode of being, varied in aspect and limited in existence; a something worth desiring, contemning, or getting rid of, as the case might be: "A hopeful, a joyful, a sorrowful stave, A launch, a voyage, a whelming wave, The cradle, the bridal-bed, and the grave." The best-living among those doubters felt satisfied with the idea that a good life on earth ought insure them an Elysium (if such there really was), and would make no difference here or hereafter, if nihility was the end of all. To the true believer, however, Zeus was a more serious affair, a something besides the mere being, doing, dying of vitalized matter on this world's stage. It was more than these-it was that which was "hid with Christ," and "bound in the bundle of life" with God—that which, with its hopes and joys and sorrows, each individual should cheerfully submit to and carry to the end, if he wished to abide in that repository and be bound for ever in that bundle-and, finally, Zeus was to them the One who, in the words of Moses, "is thy life," and who ratified the same by declaring "I am the resurrection and the life.” The poets had thus a choice of meanings when they mentioned Zeus, seeing that the word could stand for 1. The head of the pagan Pantheon. 2. Vitality, and its various manifestations. 3. The past, present, and future of transitory being. 5. Man, singly, collectively, and in the abstract. 7. God-"the Life." The first of those was current among the vulgar, and so, according to its understanding, was the sixth: those two and the intervening senses were understood by the educated profane: but the seventh was the peculiar and secret possession of the true believer; and the poets' readers were never at a loss to understand from the context when and where Zeus meant "life" or "the Life." As with Zeus, so was it with Apollo, since it represented 1. A Pagan god, ranking next to Zeus. 2. Physical light. 3. Daytime. 4. Direct vision, or open view. 5. One conspicuous for knowledge-"a light." 6. Enlightenment. 7. God-"the Light." Through those esoteric meanings "the Life, the Light❞— attached to Zeus and Apollo, not only was the pure "Science of religion" avenged for the desecration of its nomenclature, but Paganism itself, sapped thus at the very roots, was made slavishly subservient to the truth. Shielded by those names, the poet could write much that otherwise he could not, and freely-who of tyrants would dare to say that Zeus and Apollo were interdict !— since the nice distinction was a thing unknown to the profane. Shielded by those we find throughout the classics many of the most exalted aspirations to the Godhead, and embellished with the distinctive epithets and infinite attributes attached to Deity alone. Where, for instance, is there a parallel in any language for brevity and sublimity to line 412, Iliad II.? In one single verse, the grandest possibly ever written, does the poet hymn the glory, power, majesty, and effulgence of the Supreme Being; and the first three words are so onomatopoetically constructed as to make the "Jesu Criste!" sensitive to and swell upon the ear: Ζεῦ κύδιστε, μέγιστε, κελαινεφές, αιθέρι ναίων Ο Life, in glory clad, omnipotent, Throned in the clouds, and dwelling in the light! Here is a passage from Aeschylus, in which the providence, justice and consoling strength of the Most High are embodied: Τὸν ὑψόθεν σκοπὸν ἐπισκόπει, φύλακα πολυπόνων βροτῶν, οἳ τοῖς πέλας προσήμενοι Look to the Providence that is on high, Suppl. 381 Who, neighbors near unto their fellows, find Euripides invokes the majesty, omnipotence, and inscrutable nature of his God-bows down in fervent prayer-and concludes with a paraphrase of the Psalmist. "And the heavens shall declare his righteousness; for God is judge himself." Ὦ γῆς ὄχημα κἀπὶ γῆς ἔχων ἕδραν, βαίνων κελεύθου κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ ̓ ἄγεις. Troad. 884. Ο Life! earth's prop! whose footstool's on this globe! Be Thou the primal must of all that is, Be Thou the wisdom of what's made to live, |