variety of their mythology. To them the universe is all animated. Every element has its spirit; winds have voices, trees speak, rivers are sentient and potent. Man himself is involved in this network of existence. It is curious to find a mythology so complicated, varied as the Grecian, among a people with hardly any organization and already vanishing away. Buddhism is pervaded by the same characteristics. The spirit from the tree addresses the worshipper in the "Manual of Buddhism. In Borneo, the spirit of the tree is the soul of man in that stage of its transformations. The Grecian mythology and the Hindu "systems" are the most wonderous depositories and developments of such legends. All Nature palpitates and thrills with an invisible spirit-life, the very soul of its functions and relations. Through the fays and fairies, ghosts and phantoms of our own day, we seem to link ourselves on to those strange wierd conceptions of nature which grow up in that neutral territory where we first seem to behold man groping after the meaning and the spirit of natural changes. These are the mementoes to us of a whole system of religion, knowledge, philosophy; these fays that dance on the dewy sward, sleep in the lily's bell; weird and terrible in German legends; fantastic and sportive in Irish tales; immortal with Shakespeare's "Dream;" lingering traces of an old faith amid the mocking discoveries of our haughty modern science; neither of earth nor heaven, sea nor land, present nor past, they live on in our poesy, our nursery tales, our philosophic speculations, like curious flowers on some sea verge, beautiful but not of the solid land. A question will arise here: What is the solid earth? What is it which dispels the dreamy phantasy and elicits the imperishable truth? Modern Science says: I have dissipated these. I have searched the nature of the sun, the roll of the river, the flash of the lightning, the crash of the thunder, the sweep of the storm, the law of the storm, the nature of life, the path and the composition of the beam of light, the course of the stars, and the law which pervades in all the changing phenomena of Nature. The dream disappears. We stand on solid earth, awake and steadfast. The invariable sequences of Nature are our deities. It is a very doubtful claim. For behind all these old conceptions of natural phenomena lies the clear conviction of the invisible world, that world which we are so near, yet see not, hear not. The idea of the unseen lies beneath all these myths. Nay, often, through these myths, pervading them, we seem to catch the dim shadow of a great truth, the truth of a fallen immortal being contending against sin and misery and death; of a great warfare of good and evil in which we are mixed up; of a certain solemn inscrutable Providence speeding the blasting curse

against evil and protecting the good. Science has explained much; but much remains. We cannot accept scientific deduction as our solid ground and true explanation of all. The residue after the scientific exposition is more important than all the rest. It is the very basis and ground of the whole religious fabric. You may explain that the lightning is not a spirit, and the dream not a God; but you do not thus get rid of the idea implied in the myth of that something beyond ourselves, unseen, impalpable, yet powerful towards us; which we cannot shun and must propitiate. One gets wearied of the claims of science to have exploded this and the other old dream or superstition. We cannot be dull to the splendid mission of Science. But when we are told that in the establishment of certain laws and exploration of certain phenomena we have swept away all the world of conjectures, speculations, convictions which lie on the shores of the dark ocean of man's early state, we demur. We see in them what sciences cannot sweep away; and, if it could, it would only destroy its own surety. We read in them the witness of the spiritual nature of man, mementoes of a nobler origin, forecasts of a grander future. The fourth book of Wordsworth's Excursion is a noble and fervid protest against this bitter spirit of our day.

We must pass by many illustrations of our central thought and proceed to one which has struck every one as at once wonderfully suggestive of a great divine truth, yet wonderfully baffling in its details. We take up the old tragedy of Æschylus and are at once the spectators and hearers of the most startling scenes and utterances ever presented to any audience. Enter Strength and Force, with Hephaestus and the sublime victim Prometheus, amid the awful fastnesses of the Caucasian mountains. They bind Prometheus to the rock; the punishment of the great "substitute" of old mythology commences. He moans out his feeling in that incomparable plaint, yet alone in its blended dignity and tenderness. Hark! the pinions of the sea nymphs, and celestial odours float toward us as they enter. They float around the sufferer, they hover breathless as he tells his tale. Again the air is shaken and the awful form of Oceanus, the sea-god appears; he too compelled by sympathy and yearning to learn the meaning of this terrible mystery. It bursts out in abrupt sentences. Prometheus is the friend of man. has loved and aided the poor earth-dwellers, earth-sprung;-he has helped them when Jove despised, hated, trampled upon them. He has given them fire, taught them useful arts. For this he suffers there, and must suffer, till the tyrant of heaven is stricken down and the gentler era begins. He suffers "with his mortals." He had delivered them from many ills, irom fear of

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death, from savagery, and irrepressible impulse towards destruction, and medicine taught them, and house-building-they who had lived in caves and holes in the earth. Taught them also to know and understand the seasons, the rising and setting stars, number and letters and memory. Taught them to subdue and turn to their service the useful beasts and horses champing the bit. Taught them to traverse the sea in winged ships. And gave them hope, that saveth man from despair. "These did I devise for mortals, these arts; and now, Ah me! is left me for myself but this, to suffer."

Again, another voice, and wandering Io enters, yet another victim of Jove, fatal both in his love and hate. Io tells her tale, she suffers thus, changed to a beast, stung by the gad-fly, the victim of Jove's selfish passion. After clear answers to his questions as to herself, she asks Prometheus why he does not cast himself headlong from the rock and foil the tyrant by death. Prometheus replies in his high strain. If there were no hope he would desire death; but he cannot die. He is bound here whilst Zeus reigns. And shall Zeus fall? And so through question and answer the great sufferer begins to counsel Io. He describes her future wanderings; a description unintelligible on any ground of locality, only serving to show how ignorant in all that mechanical knowledge on which we moderns pride ourselves, could be the age which produced such a huge sublime old piece of legendary truth. Then he turns to himself. Yes, he must suffer; he cannot die. But not for ever. A mightier than Zeus, one strong with a strength which he cannot wield, shall hurl him down. Let him belch his fires and dart his bolts, and roll his thunders. The good and faithful can wait. Another step. The winged herald of the Gods enters. He demands from Prometheus-the crafty-the details of those fatal nuptials, whence, as he has prophesied, shall ensue the downfall of Zeus. He denounces a storm of horrible blasting fire if Prometheus refuses. In vain. Prometheus coldly expresses his scornful defiance. This young herald speaks as one vain of his office to the veteran of many wars. No, Prometheus repeats his prophetic warning. More he will not reveal. He laughs at the threats of Mercury. With high insults the messenger departs. His threats begins to fulfil. The earth shakes, the thunder rolls, the flaring bolts smite the fettered victim, wild winds whirl up the desert sands, the tempest confounds sea and sky. In darkness, shot through by dreadful fire, amid the confounding tumult of all the elements let loose to rage and shatter round that rock, with the voice of the Titan sounding in the pauses of the horrible din,-the scene and the sufferer whirl away from sight.

Now here is a huge fragment of some still vaster truth, so near, yet so far away, from the very central truth of our Christian verity, that we naturally enquire whence it comes, and its origin and transmission. What great conflict does this tradition indicate? What victory? The triumph of whom? Is it an undecipherable record of some great event in which our race is ultimately interested? Is it a prophecy of a future which has already come or is to come? What is it?-this strange production which arrests us just as man emerges from the dark unknown period of his primal state, and suggests so much, yet baffles us so completely. Nor is it alone in its vague "shadows of good things." A great conflict, a great deliverance ;-these indications of some grand truth rise before us vague, yet real, in that dim era of the history of all old races when, as yet, but vague glimpses of things or puzzling mementoes of some former state prevail. Amongst all peoples the conviction, kindred, if not ore, with the Promethean myth, is to be found of a brighter time-once possessed, now lost-and a golden era to come. The Persians saw forward to such an age; the Indians count for it on to the tenth Avatar, or Incarnation; the Buddhist, rapt in divine ecstasy, foresees the Incarnation of Vishnu as Kalki,restoring happiness, overthrowing evil; the Chinese look for a great Holy One from the West; the Mexicans at first hailed the Spaniards on the ground of such a hope; the great chain of northern traditions breathe the same inspiration. Baldrickthe good, the beautiful-perishes by the craft of Loki. Earth mourns; there is battle among the Gods; the world perishes by fire. Vidur, the conqueror, comes to restore all. Baldrick lives again. Perpetual spring clothes the earth. Virgil carries down the old legend from some ancient race in his splendid Fourth Eclogue. The curious conglomerate of tales in the history of our own King Arthur seems to echo the same far-away meaning. What shall we say of these? Curious flowers of that border-land, seeming in one aspect ruins of some noble era long swallowed up, as the shore is often by the sea, and re-appearing after cycles of change; seeming in another aspect as forecasts of that greater future, whose prophecy lies deep in the human heart and at the basis of all history. We have no space to gather up many other strange signs of that border-realm; indication of sacrifice; fore-shadowings of judgment and immortality; startling speculations as to life and spirit and the divine; but all changed, puzzling, like yet unlike to much now familiar to us in our religious convictions.

We have no time to recal more of these. But we must turn a thought to the question which must inevitably rise to our hearts, as standing amid these curious indications of a peculiar

period of man's spiritual history, we ask ourselves as to their origin. Whence come they? What are they? Are they the great fragments of a former state of man's spiritual being, or foreshadowings of his future? Spring they out of his own restless heart, or are they the traditions of a clear knowledge, become dim and confused in some great fall? We look at the border-realm of the sea, and as we gather its strange plants, we ask-Is this rescued from the sea? or is it being gradually engulphed in the deep? So we ask of man, as depicted in these old myths. Has man fallen, and his faith and knowledge with him, as in the Hesiodic "Works and Days?" Are these the strange scutcheons of a nobler heraldry, treasured to indicate our great fall, and incite us to a nobler future? Are we, at length, coming to realize them as high majestic prophecies ?

But even as we meditate on the question, a certain ludicrous aspect of it arrests and sets our thoughts at work on a new phase of the idea. We pass with a crowd into a fine spacious building, and stand in astonishment, puzzled and perplexed. It is a chapel of the Establishment-Protestant. Yet here is an altar, blazing with light; in the clear day shine an altar-piece, a banner with a crucifix, a central cross with a figure of Christ on it, and a cross with a figure on either side. Flowers pleasantly and artistically disposed. I gaze and marvel. As I gaze, enter a procession to processional hymn, clergy leading. Bowings and scrapings before the altar: then here is a man-a priest, an obliging devotee tells me-turns his torso toward us, displaying a huge cross upon it, and intones a prayer. Then an officiating cherub, in white over scarlet with a huge cross, leads this individual to the pulpit, and holds up the huge cross, whilst the preacher tells us that there, on the altar, is the real presence of the Lord Jesus, ready to cure us, as He did the leper. We are exhorted to confess our sins to the priests; and — eh! Shades of Cranmer and Latimer! can it be?-our prayers for the dead are publicly asked. And this is a Protestant church; and it is the Protestant prayer-book this man is using. Here is a border region surely, very speedily to submerge in rank Popery.

And even when we turn to our own Nonconformist pastures, are we not sometimes startled at strange, uncouth, and even grotesque growths? But we have come to the limits of our space, and must hold our hand. Else, surely, at times, both in doctrine and in practice, we may be apt to fancy ourselves still on the border land, in the debatable region, neither sea nor good dry land, curious, interesting, but bearing no crops of corn, nor even a decent potatoe.