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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text
Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1869. Excerpt: ... VIII. The Olympian System in its Results. The history of the race of Adam before the Advent is the history of a long and varied but incessant preparation for the Advent. It is commonly perceived that Greece contributed a language and an intellectual discipline, Borne a political organization, to the apparatus which was put in readiness to assist the propagation of.the Gospel; and that each of these, in its kind, was the most perfect that the world had produced. I have endeavored elsewhere to show with some fulness what was the place of Greece in the Providential order of the world;1 and likewise what was the relation of Homer to the Greeks, and to their part of the Divine plan, as compared with the relation of the Sacred Scriptures to the chosen people of God.2 I cannot now enter on that field at large; yet neither can I part without a word from the subject of the Olympian religion. In the works of Homer, this design is projected with such extraordinary grandeur, that the representation of it, altogether apart from the general merits of the Poems, deserves to be considered as one of the topmost achievements of the human mind. Yet its character, as it was first and best set forth in its entirety from the brain of the finisher and the maker, is not more wonderful than its subsequent influence and duration in actual life. For, during twelve or fourteen hundred years, it was the religion of the most thoughtful, the most fruitful, the most energetic portions of the human 1 Address to the University of Edinburgh, 1865. 2 Studies on Homer, vol. ii. Olympos, sect. x. family. It yielded to Christianity alone; and to the Church it yielded with reluctance, summoning up strength in its extreme old age, and only giving way after an intellectual as well as a civil batt...
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