highest moral purposes. Truth is one, and wherever we find it, whether in the spacious fields of pagan writing, or in the inspired oracles of God, we ought to use it and appreciate it with thankful spirit. "Truth," says Clement," is an ever-flowing river into which streams flow from many sides."

we pos-
yearn-

or the Athenian legislator. We must never forget that "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." But in the midst of much that is unsatisfying and worthless in the literature outside the range of inspiration, we come not unfrequently upon grains of gold which can hardly be distinguished from those contained within the casket of the Bible. We are thankful for the discovery, and in the words of the laureate,

We yield all honor to the name

None of men ever can be blessed, but evil all,

Poor mortals upon whom the sun doth

The task of producing parallel passages from pagan and Biblical literature, and thereby showing the common grounds of the needs of our poor humanity in every part of the world, is easy enough. And the raison d'être of Of him who made them current coin. this similarity is natural enough. Man in the essential features of his nature In the passages which we have culled is now what he was two thousand for this paper we note rather similarity years ago. We have escaped, as than identity. Their parallelism is on one has said, from the Egypt of barbarism into a lower plane, and has points of conthe Canaan of civilization, but tact rather than lines of continuous sess still the old instincts, the old comparison. They furnish striking and ings, the old wants. Underneath the beautiful coincidences which utter vivsplendid robes of outward adornment idly the longing that lies in every heart, the heart is the same as that which deep and irrepressible. What comprethrobbed and kindled under the coarser hension, what insight, what power of trappings of the olden time. Sin and vision they indicate! Solon's wisdom sorrow, and need and death, touch us as and varied experience give utterance to they touched the old Greeks of Plato's the thought which is but an echo of day, or the older nomads of the desert the Psalmist's sad verse :— who were contemporaneous with Job. We need not therefore be surprised to find an occasional resemblance between pagan and Jewish thought, or between pagan and Christian thought. All discovery of moral truth is due, as Archdeacon Farrar has remarked, to that revealing spirit which is called in Scripture "the candle of the Lord," and "which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." We make no comparison between pagan teaching and inspired Scripture teaching, nor do we place them on the same level of authority. If we read the best of the heathen writings, the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius, for example, or the wise sayings of Solon, and then turn to the discourses of Jesus, or the Epistles of St. Paul, we must acknowledge that moral and spiritual truth shines in the verses of the apostle and in the parables of our Lord, with a brilliancy and a strength and a suasive force not to be found in the words, wise and beautiful though they are, of the imperial stoic,

shine.

"To live in pain, such is the lot appointed by the gods to miserable mortals." How like to these words of Homer are the lines of the apostle, "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."

Solon gave currency to a sentiment of Theognis of Megara, the truth of which he had no doubt verified by his wide observation of human life :Pride, O Kyrnos! God first gave to that

poor wretch

Whom He would deprive of other's fair

esteem.

So fulness begetteth pride when wretchedness befalls

The evil man, or him whose soul is not upright.

Contrast the comparative diffuseness of this thought with the compact phrase of the wiser king of Israel, "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty

66

spirit before a fall." The same maxim tian teaching when he says, under appears in many languages, and indi- like circumstances, "Being reviled we cates the delight with which men have bless," or rather, we give good in all ages welcomed the statement of a words," catching and reflecting the fact of general experience, in which moral tone of his Master's high philosthey doubtless saw also a proof of a ophy as set forth in the Sermon on the divine government. Mount. Humanity was transformed by Christ; it was "changed," as one has said, "from a restraint to a motive." Love is the governing principle in the kingdom of God. Ancient poetry knows nothing of it. "It was a discovery like that of a new scientific principle when it was made, and Christianity made it."

Philemon, the gentle rival of Menander (from whom St. Paul quotes the proverb, "Evil companionships corrupt honest characters "), whose cheerful spirits and regular, temperate habits prolonged his life to the patriarchal age of ninety-seven years, has several singularly beautiful passages, almost Christian in their tone. Here is one which reminds us of the warning of Balaam to the royal son of Zippor. It looks almost like a paraphrase of the words of the false prophet:

And how beautiful is the following passage from the same gentle poet! It seems steeped in tears, a sob of human sorrow, a cry from the depths of the breaking heart, reminding us of

Though one should sacrifice, dear Pam- many a passage in Holy Writ: philus,

If tears were the medicine of all our ills,

Whole herds of bulls or rams, or other Ever would laments give surcease to toils,

choicer victims,

Or consecrate a costly tapestry, or robes inwrought

With gold and purple, or in ivory and
smaragd,

Deeming thus to make the god propitious,
He is self-deceived- is dull at heart!
For man should live in honest guise,
Nor spoiling maiden's honor, nor in lust,
Nor robbing, nor spilling blood for gold,
Nor coveting another's wealth.

For God knoweth what deeds are just,
And lets the toiler uplift his inner life.
Tilling his fields both night and day
The righteous man offers rightly unto God,
Nor shines so much in robes as in his heart.
What a touch of Pauline thought there
seems to be in the beautiful lines which
close this passage!

How nearly Christian is this too : Nought is sweeter, nought is liker to gentle harmony

Than to be able to endure reviling.
For the reviler-if he who is reviled
Reply not reviling, himself reviles.

We would give untold treasures for such

tears.

But no, the busy world nor heeds nor
glances

At them; but upon its way, good friend,
Whether weep'st thou or not, it holds.
What canst thou otherwise? Ah! nought,
For grief, as trees do fruit, bears but tears.

Antiphanes ridicules the meretricious-
ness of women in words that bring
Isaiah's scathing rebukes to our minds.
In reading his graphic lines we seem to
see the artificial beauty walking along,
"walking and mincing as she goes,"
seeking to catch the eyes of the fine
gentlemen of the time :
She comes,

She goes back, she approaches, she goes back,

She has come, she is here, she washes herself, she advances,

She is soaped, she is combed, she goes out, is rubbed,

She washes herself, looks in the glass, besmears herself;

In that touch, "if he who is reviled And if aught is wrong chokes (with vexareply not," we have what corresponds

to the silence and self-restraint which

tion).

Pindar says, "The clandestine pur

an Old Testament saint imposed upon suit of love is something sweet." This himself when unjustly accused (Ps. is the thought which Solomon has xxxix. 1, 2). But St. Paul rises to a compressed into, "Stolen waters are higher level of Christian life and Chris-sweet."

Neither listen to, nor see, things unfit. Is not this much like the psalmist's The immortal's mind to men is quite un- prayer, "Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity"?

We need not go further with these parallelisms. The early Christian apologists, it will be seen, had much material at hand by which to prove to their pagan neighbors that their own poets were groping darkly after those truths Chiefly bid to thy feast the friend that which the Gospel proclaimed with the

Neighbors will come in haste, while kins- Athens, "seeking the Lord, if haply

they might feel after him, and find him,
though he be not far from every one
us; for in him we live, and move,
have our being; as certain of your own
poets have said, For we are also his off-
spring."
"We and the philosophers,"
says Clement of Alexandria, and we
may say the same of the poets, "know
the same God, but not in the same
way."

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O GIN I were a sodger lad, a blithe lad I THE joy of babes who see the primrose

But he is auld, his heart's grown cauld, and. O lady mine! the birds have ceased to

I must stop short of thee the whole day Its native gloom and flood it with delight.

But when sleep comes to close each difficult The woods stand tranced in stillness; one