fully armed, in bright brass, molten from the spoils of war, with uplifted spear and broad shield, as the proper guardian of the city. Wisdom, War, and Victory were symbolized in chiselled forms, as was Jupiter, reputed father of gods and men; and never before had marble yielded so perfectly to the sculptor's power. "I have beheld"-said the great Preacher "I have beheld your devotions." But the σßáoμara were not acts, but objects, of devotion; or, as our inimitable English translators have put it in the margin of their Bible," the gods that ye worship."

Now if any one wishes to gaze upon the very objects on which the Apostle did so intently gaze when he was in Athens, when he was taken up to the Areopagus, when the idolatry of the city stirred his spirit, and when, weary of the place, and separated from the company of his dearest Christian brethren, he complained that he was left alone, he may do so. It is only to take the first opportunity for going to the British Museum. When there, let him ask for the Elgin room. Let him pass by the more imposing masses that remind one of Egypt and Assyria. Leaving the more stately galleries, he goes into the Elgin room. There he will see battered and broken marbles in rilievo, placed round the room; and on something like tables, on the floor, there lie mutilated marble trunks. But he must not be disappointed. If he will stay for a few moments, and examine so much as remains perfect, or even nearly perfect, it will commend itself by the perfection of its forms. Here, a rough surface tells that it has been eaten by the inclement seasons of two thousand years and more. There, the smooth and almost shining surface reveals a perfection that rapacious time has not yet destroyed. These marbles were brought from the Parthenon, and on them the Evangelist of Athens threw his frequent glance. That glance fell from an eye moist with pity for the worshippers of those images, yet not insensible-if his Apostolic fervour could brook delay for admiring any earthly object-not insensible to their unequalled beauty.

But before the visiter leaves the Elgin marbles, he should be informed that that Theseus, whose battered head is yet

erect over his majestic shoulders, was a masterpiece of the sculptor Phidias. Phidias disdained to make statues like his predecessors, even such as you will now find in Continental mass-houses; that is to say, heads, and hands, and feet carved, and the rest of the figures rudely misshapen and covered with real clothes. Phidias carved his work from top to toe, and finished the anatomy of a back that was to be hidden by the wall, as exquisitely as that of the limb that was to be uplifted with action in the air. He draped his marble statues with pure gold. And after him artists learned to rise above the negligence of their predecessors, and laboured on their statuary in every part. But now to the Parthenon.

The Acropolis is a rock that rises abruptly in the heart of Athens, forming a natural fortress, its sides being scarped without the aid of art, except at the western end. Its greatest length is said to be about twelve hundred feet, and its greatest breadth about five hundred and fifty. In the time of the Apostle, the approach, at the west, was through magnificent marble-work, called the Propylaa, or advanced gates, that served at once for defence and ornament; and this outwork being passed, the ascent to the Acropolis was by spacious stairs. Here, guarded, so to speak, by the great statue of the Minerva Promachus, was the Parthenon, so called from πaplévoç, a virgin, because it was dedicated to Minerva, a virgin-goddess. This was the finest temple in Athens; and, for symmetry and elegance, was probably not second to any in the world. It was erected in the time of Pericles, nearly four hundred and fifty years before Christ. Callicrates and Ictinus were the architects. Phidias, with many assistants who followed his directions in rougher working, executed the sculptures, and watched the progress of the building, and the conservation of its plan in all the details. The grandeur of the Parthenon, however, was not owing to its size; for its extreme length was only about two hundred and twenty-eight feet, and its breadth one hundred and one feet, measuring at the upper step of the stylobate; and the height was sixty-six feet to the top of the pediment. The peristyle consisted of forty-six columns; being seventeen at

either side, and eight at either front, counting those at the corners twice. These columns were six feet two inches in diameter at the base, and thirty-four feet in height. The roof over the cella, or interior, was supported by two rows of columns. The sculptures were, first, those in the tympana of the pediments, (or inner portions of the triangular gable-ends of the roof above the two porticoes,) each of which was filled with twenty-four colossal figures. The group in the eastern front, of which a small part remains in our engraving, represented the birth of Minerva from the head of Jupiter; and in the west was the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the land of Attica. The figures referred to as exhibited in the middle of the Elgin room, were taken from these pediments. The order is Doric. And having referred the reader to the Museum, we must tell him that he will find there two models of this temple; one showing its ruinous, and the other its perfect, state.

Like the other great temples of the Old World, the Parthenon has undergone great changes of occupation. On the decay of Paganism, it became a Christian church; the sculpture of pediments, entablatures, and frieze remaining undisturbed. Then, on the conquest of Greece by the Turks, it was made a mosque. Like the mosque of Sophia, in Constantinople, it was crowded round with mean buildings; and a powder-magazine was placed within the Propylæa at the foot of the Acropolis. When the Venetians beseiged Athens in the year 1687, the magazine blew up, the western part of the temple was much shattered, and a bomb from the Venetians sent in the roof. Before that time, the building and its sculptures were in a state of surprisingly good preservation; but war finished the dilapidation that the barbarism of the Turks had not completed.

Yet such ruins have an eloquence of their own. The last fragments are a reality that links the spectator with the past; while the poor surrounding dwellings, and the social misery of Athens, not yet able to cast off the wreck and exhaustion of the past, moans for pity, and itself confesses what the subjects of King Otho may not know, that after the religions represented by that precious ruin on the

Acropolis, after Paganism, after the larva of Christianity that alone remains to Greece, and after the sanguinary system of the Koran have passed away, it will be the glory of the religion of the Gospel to rebuild the palaces, renovate the intellect, and restore the liberties of Greece. This King, they say, encourages the attempt to raise up the prostrate columns of the Parthenon; and who that has ever dared to hope to bend his knee with a Christian congregation in spiritual worship even where the Panagia, as they call the Virgin Mary, once displaced Athena, shall be told that he should not press onward in prayerful hope, without shrinking in fear of disappointment? In this age of Missions, if Islamism and idolatry have seized on ancient temples, why not Christianity ?

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.

THE most eminent disciple of Thales in the school of which he was the immediate founder was Anaxagoras, whose name acquired still greater celebrity as the preceptor of Socrates, Euripides, and Pericles. According to the testimony of Aristotle, he rejected the doctrine of emanation, and taught that "mind is the first principle of all things pure, simple, and unmixed; that it possesses within itself the united powers of thought and motion; that it gives motion to the universe, and is the cause of whatever is fair and good."* Plato also represents Socrates as stating, that "having once heard a person reading from a book, written, as he said, by Anaxagoras, and which affirmed that it was intelligence that sets in order and is the cause of all things, he was delighted with this cause; that it appeared to him to be well that intelligence should be the cause of all things, and that he considered with himself whether or not it were so, that a regulating intelligence thus orders all things, and disposes each in such a way as will be best for it." These accounts of the views of Anaxagoras are confirmed by Plutarch. "The Ionic philosophers, who appeared before Anaxagoras, made fortune, or blind necessity, (that is, the fortuitous or

necessary motions of the particles of matter,) the first principle in nature; but Anaxagoras affirmed that a pure mind, free from all material concretions, governs the universe." To Anaxagoras, therefore, must be conceded the distinguished honour of being the first of the Grecian sages who maintained that matter and mind have nothing in common, and who conceived of mind as simply acting upon matter with intelligence and design, as in the formation of the universe. To the infinite mind which his predecessors had confounded with matter, he gave a separate and independent being, thus assigning an adequate cause for the existence of material objects.

Anaximander, the immediate disciple of Thales, taught that rò aπpov, infinity or immensity, is the first principle of all things, that from it all things are produced, and that in it all things shall terminate. The exact import of the word employed by Anaximander has occasioned considerable controversy. It is most probably synonymous with the watery mass of Thales, † which, in accordance with the views of the same philosopher, he held to be animated with the Divine principle. On the other hand, Anaximenes, disciple of Anaximander, held that the first principle of all things is air. He taught that air is God, being diffused through all nature, and perpetually active; a view evidently adopted by Virgil in the second book of his Georgics. "The spring, too, is beneficial to the foliage of the groves; the spring is beneficial to the woods; in spring the lands swell, and demand the genial seeds; then Almighty Father Æther descends in fertilizing showers into the bosom of his joyous spouse."

The views of Anaxagoras, therefore, were greatly in advance of those of his predecessors in the Ionic school. Instead of confounding mind with matter, or regarding the

Thales was born in the first year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad, Anaximander in the third of the forty-second, Anaximenes about the fifty-sixth, and Anaxagoras in the first year of the seventieth. The Greek Olympiads were periods of four years, and began seven hundred and seventy-six years before Christ.

+ Homer uses the phrase 'Aжɛíρшv yain, to indicate the world or globe of the earth, as being immense or boundless.