belief was only a subordinate part of the popular religion which philosophers like Plato certainly made use of on occasion, but which was of no importance in their own view. Now it became a question of the most earnest religious interest. The One God of the philosophers was placed at too great a height for the mind to venture to connect his actions and his existence with the course of nature and the events of human life. The popular gods, who were supposed to take part in both, could not, it was thought, be regarded as gods in a strict and complete sense, on this very account. But the need which had created polytheism, had not yet passed away: people could not abandon the habit of representing divine beings to themselves, in sensuous shape and definite form. What remained to them but to place alongside of the divinity a number of inferior beings, who might be the bond between him and the world, inasmuch as they represented divine power in a limited sphere, and took individual parts of the world and individual men under their special protection. Such beings are the dæmons. They are the old gods of polytheism, but deprived of their independence, and subordinated to the one monotheistic God as his servants and instruments. By adopting the dæmons in the place of the gods, polytheism shows its readiness to yield the place to monotheism, provided that it be still allowed to retain a subordinate position.

This tendency was widely spread at this time among the followers of the only strictly monotheistic religion of ancient history, Judaism. In the centuries succeeding the Babylonian captivity a new element entered into the Jewish mind in the belief in angels and devils, which afforded a certain satisfaction to the polytheistic tendency within the range of monotheism. The difference between the old gods, who as dæmons and lesser gods had submitted themselves to the one Supreme God, and the ministering spirits now surrounding the one God of the Jews, was so slight, that there appeared nothing essential to interfere with the blending of the two. And the Alexandrian Jews began already to put forth a theory concerning divine powers and the supporter of these powers, the "Logos," or Word of God, in which the Jewish belief in angels was brought into the closest connection with the Greek belief in dæmons, and with the philosophers' doctrine of ideas, and of the universal all-penetrating Divine intelligence or Logos. This blending of the two religions was also prepared for in another way. Partly by the mixing of races of the Roman and Alexandrian time, partly by the spread of Greek philosophy, the limits were broken down which hitherto had kept the nations divided in self-sufficing separateness. The Greek had to accustom himself to recognise the existence of moral and intellectual qualities also among the "Barbarians," on the

supposed sole possession of which he had hitherto rested his proud contempt for all that was not Greek; and the Jew began to doubt of the exclusive election of his people, when he found the Greek possessed of a superior intellectual cultivation, doubtless also a gift of God, and of an insight into religious things, in recognising which his national vanity could only poorly soothe itself by the groundless assumption that the old Greek sages had borrowed their treasures from the Jewish prophets and the Old Testament writings. So by degrees the truth was recognised, the gradual diffusion of which is to be regarded as the lasting merit of the Stoic school, that all men in right of their intellectual nature are equal, and stand under the same law, that they have the same natural rights, and the same moral duties, that they all alike are to be regarded as children of God, as citizens of one and the same community, comprising the whole of mankind.

People learnt to look on the relation of man to God as immediate and inward, limited to no nationality, no class, and no race; to consider the service of a pious heart and a virtuous life as more essential than national forms of worship, and to substitute for priestly mediation the communion of man with God. This refinement of moral and religious consciousness had been first brought about in an extensive way among the Greeks, and through the means of Greek philosophy; but Judaism had not been excluded from its effect. Since the second century before Christ a party appeared in the Essenes, obviously connected with the Greek Neo-Pythagoreanism, and through it with the whole philosophy of that time, which gave itself up to an inward unworldly piety, devoted to poverty and renunciation, to universal human love, and the removal of all inequality among men, but which, on the other hand, was indifferent to the national expectations of a Messiah, and rejected the whole system of sacrifices, the corner-stone of Jewish religious worship, setting up in the place of the Jewish hierarchical institutions a monastically organised community of ascetics. But this change in moral feeling is itself most closely connected with the development of the conceptions concerning the Divinity. If one God, whose kingdom is the whole world, took the place of the many popular gods, one Divine Right and Law must embrace all men, and thus not only the separations of national religions would disappear, but also the service of a pious life, common to all, would naturally come to appear the essential thing, as opposed to special and outward forms of worship. And so inversely; if people recognised the mutual dependence and equality of all mankind, they could not continue to believe in a variety of gods; if humanity is but one, if it is subjected to the same destiny and the same law, there can be but one and the same power by which all men are ruled and

governed. The belief in the unity of God, and the belief in the equality of all men, and their moral obligations, reciprocally tend to produce each other; both these were developed at the same time in the old world, and so prepared a soil for Christianity, in which not only the seed of a new religion and a new moral life could be planted from without, but in which it could itself arise and grow, according to the laws of historical development.

But however important is the place which Greek philosophy assumes, as the precursor of Christianity, when Christianity itself came forth in its special character and declared war against the polytheistic religions of former times, then this very philosophy became the last champion of heathenism. This should indeed not be said without some reservations. Not a few philosophically-cultivated individuals passed over to the new religion; many more gained as Christians, in the schools of the philosophers, the scientific cultivation which they needed for the defence and for the theological development of their faith. Greek philosophy in this way worked not only beyond the pale of, and against the Church, but also within it, and for it; and closer investigation would show that from the beginning its influence on Christian theology and Christian morals was far wider and more lasting than has been usually thought to be the case. But the greater number of Greek philosophers looked with deep contempt on a faith, which in its positive dogmas appeared to them superstitious, and in its opposition to existing religions, absolutely criminal, and afterwards, when it grew into a power, threatening and ultimately victorious, they met it with bitter hatred. About the middle of the third century, Greek philosophy collected together, for the last time, all the strength which it still possessed, in the Neo-Platonic school. The theological system of this school appears to have consisted in an ingenious and well-worked-out attempt to harmonise a philosophical monotheism with the polytheism which the Greek mind found it so hard to give up. The method of combining them is similar to what we have already found in the Stoic doctrine, although differing in some especial points. One Supreme Being is conceived to exist, without limitations, intangible, incomprehensible, but at the same time the source of all being, and the seat of all perfection. From him issues, as the overflow of his fulness, the natural effects of his power, the whole series of finite beings; but the farther things are removed from their original source, and the more intermediate steps come between, the more imperfect they become, till at last the pure light of divine power is extinguished in the darkness of matter. All things thus form a series of gradually-diminishing perfectness, all are supported by divine force, but this is distributed to them in various measure as to quantity, and as to purity. For this reason, say the

Neo-Platonists, it is necessary to ascend from the lower degrees by natural steps to the higher, we must let ourselves be led from the lower gods in regular ascent to the highest God, we must not reject a sensual means of transmission of spiritual good things. Since they translate the Greek and Oriental gods, after the arbitrary manner common to allegorical interpretation, into the abstract ideas of their metaphysical system, and since they seek for the natural development of a higher life, not in the recognition and the working out of realities, but in the devotional exercises of all popular religions and mysteries, in sacrifices and prayers, in prophecies and vows, in worship of statues and Theurgy, all that is coarse and fanciful in mythology, all the mere externals of worship, all the manifold superstitions of centuries, found in their system a studied explanation. This system could not indeed in the end resist the purer doctrine, and the moral force of Christianity, but so great, even in defeat, was the influence of the Greek mind, though now worn out, and in many ways become untrue to itself, that the conquering church adopted into her system, during the struggle, the very philosophy which had contested the possession of Greece with her to the utmost. NcoPlatonism was conquered, as far as it was identified with heathenism, but as a form of Christian speculation the Church accepted it into her system; she paid the highest respect to the writings which a Christian Neo-Platonist put forth under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite; she adopted in defence of her dogmas, her sacraments, her hierarchical institutions, the very same arguments which her heathen opponents had formerly used against her. In this way also, the influence of the Greck clement can be traced down to the present time. But certainly of far deeper importance to all future time was the service done by Greek philosophy in the opposite direction, by refining religious conceptions, and purifying moral ideas; and of this gradual work, I trust, as far as my narrow limits allowed, that I have been able to give a not altogether incomplete account.

The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and other parts of Europe. By Dr. F. KELLER. Translated and arranged by J. E. LEE, F.S.A. Longmans. 1866.

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one who had the pleasure of listening to the lucid and able resumé of recent scientific discoveries which Professor Phillips gave in his presidential address to the British Association at Birmingham, will need to be reminded of the very curious questions that were there suggested in consequence of the discovery of traces of human habitations in the lakes of Switzerland and other parts of Europe. And all who feel an interest in this matter will, we are sure, hail with pleasure the appearance of the most excellent, exhaustive, and beautifully illustrated work of Dr. Keller, so admirably translated and arranged by Mr. J. E. Lee.

The existence of lake dwellings has long been known to the classical student at least. We remember how Herodotus tells us of the settlements on Prasias, the modern Takhyno, where the men lived on "platforms supported on tall piles, standing in the middle of the lake, which are approached from the land by a single narrow bridge. ... Each has his own hut, wherein he dwells upon one of the platforms, and each has also a trap-door, giving access to the lake beneath; and their wont is to tie their baby children by the foot with a string to save them from rolling into the water. They feed their horses and their other beasts upon fish, which abound in the lake to such a degree that a man has only to open his trap-door and to let down a basket