J. N. Larned

“ As society becomes more advanced and complicated, the judicial power can no longer be exercised by the Assembly itself, while it would be against every democratic instinct to leave it in the arbitrary power of individual magistrates. Other Committees of the Assembly, Juries on a gigantic scale, with a presiding magistrate as chairman rather than as Judge, are therefore set apart to decide causes and to sit in judgment on offenders. Such is pure Democracy, the government of the whole people and not of a part of it only, as carried out in its full perfection in a single city. ”

“ For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. ”

“ Out of Christianity, now become independent, a principle once more sprang forth akin to the principles of the Old Testament,—a new outward shaping of the kingdom of God, a new discipline of the law which one day was to serve for the training of rude nations, a new tutorship for the spirit of humanity, until it should arrive at the maturity of the perfect manhood in Christ. ”

“ The age of debate is beginning, and even Herodotus, the least of a wrangler of any man, and the most of a sweet and simple narrator, felt the effect. When we come to Thucydides, the results of discussion are as full as they have ever been; his light is pure, 'dry light,' free from the 'humours' of habit, and purged from consecrated usage. As Grote's history often reads like a report to Parliament, so half Thucydides reads like a speech, or materials for a speech, in the Athenian Assembly. ”

“ He ravished the ruins of the ancient world to restore the monumental arts. A new Rome arose in the depths of the forests of Austrasia—palaces, gates, bridges, baths, galleries, theatres, churches,—for the erection of which the mosaics and marbles of Italy were laid under tribute, and workmen summoned from all parts of Europe. It was there that an extensive library was gathered, there that the school of the palace was made permanent, there that foreign envoys were pompously welcomed, there that the monarch perfected his plans for the introduction of Roman letters and the improvement of music. ”

“ No city of the ancient or modern world ever rivalled Athens in the riches of art. Our best filled museums, though teeming with her spoils, are poor collections of fragments compared with that assemblage of gods and heroes which peopled the Acropolis, the genuine Olympos of the arts. ”

“ The horrors of the retreat form one of the darkest passages in English military history. In bitter cold and snow, which took all life out of the wretched Sepoys, without proper clothing or shelter, and hampered by a disorderly mass of thousands of camp-followers, the army entered the terrible defiles which lie between Cabul and Jellalabad. Whether Akbar Khan could, had he wished it, have restrained his fanatical followers is uncertain. As a fact the retiring crowd—it can scarcely be called an army—was a mere unresisting prey to the assaults of the mountaineers. ”

“ But it is not by considering the evil only, any more than the good only, that it is possible to form a just judgment upon an historic epoch. To judge the Byzantine Empire only by the crimes which defiled the palace would be as unjust as if the French people were to be estimated by nothing but the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Reign of Terror, and the Commune of 1871. The dynastic crimes and revolutions of New Rome were not a constant feature in her history. On the contrary, the times of trouble and anarchy were episodes between long periods of peace. ”

“ She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man's counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime I say: "Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of those days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless." ”

“ I have paid the required tribute, in obedience to the law, making use of such fitting words as I had. The tribute of deeds has been paid in part; for the dead have been honourably interred, and it remains only that their children should be maintained at the public charge until they are grown up: this is the solid prize with which, as with a garland, Athens crowns her sons living and dead, after a struggle like theirs. For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state. ”

“ Paul saw such dangers to the growth of Christian manliness and to the unity of the Christian body—the idly curious and gossiping men of Athens; the vain and shamelessly ostentatious Corinthians, men in intellect, but in moral seriousness babes; the Ephesians, 'like children carried away with every blast of vain teaching,' the victims of every impostor, and sport of every deceit; the Cretans, proverbially, 'ever liars, evil beasts, slow bellies;' the passionate, volatile, Greek-speaking, Celts of Asia, the 'foolish' Galatians. ”

“ In no part of Western Europe do we find districts inhabited by men differing in speech and national feeling, lying in distinct patches here and there over a large country. A district like one of our larger counties in which one parish, perhaps one hundred, spoke Welsh, another Latin, another English, another Danish, another Old French, another the tongue of more modern settlers, Flemings, Huguenots or Palatines, is something which we find hard to conceive, and which, as applied to our own land or to any other Western land, sounds absurd on the face of it. ”

“ Keen, subtle, capricious, satirical, sated with ideas, eager for novelty, yet with the eagerness of amused frivolity, not of the truth-seeker: critical by instinct, exquisitely sensitive to the ridiculous or the absurd, disputatious, ready to listen, yet impatient of all that was not wit, satisfied with everything in life except its shortness, and therefore hiding all references to this unwelcome fact under a veil of complacent euphemism—where could a more uncongenial soil be found for the seed of the Gospel? ”

“ The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words. Anyone can discourse to you for ever about the advantages of a brave defence which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it ”

“ While the chief dialects of Greece survive, each not as a mere dialect but as the language of literature,—a thing unknown in the history of any other people,—the Attic idiom, in which the characteristic elements of other dialects met and were blended, has become to us, as it did to the ancients, the very type of Hellenic speech. Athens was not only the 'capital of Greece,' the 'school of Greece;' it deserves the name applied to it in an epitaph on Euripides: 'his country is Athens, Greece of Greece.' The rays of the Greek genius here found a centre and a focus. ”

“ To the eclectic philosophy which now dominated the schools of Athens, Judaism alone among all human opinions was as if non-existent. That Athenians should be convinced by the philosophy of a Jew would be a proposition expressible in words but wholly destitute of meaning. On the other hand, the Jew was not altogether uninfluenced by Greek thought. Wide apart as the two minds were, the Hebraic proved not insensible to the charm of the Hellenic; witness the Epistle to the Hebrews, witness Philo, witness the intrusion of Greek methods of interpretation even into the text-books of Rabbinism. ”

“ An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. ”

“ Why do Holland and Belgium cling to their existence as separate States, in spite of all the efforts of statesmen to join them? Why do the people of Bohemia and Croatia, of Finland, and of Poland, refuse to coalesce with the rest of the population of the empires of which they form but small sections? Why, finally, do the new kingdoms of Roumania and Servia show such astonishing vitality? ”

“ In most of them the kingship surrendered to an oligarchy,—the oligarchy in time, was overthrown by some bold adventurer, who led a rising of the people and snatched power in the turmoil to make himself a "tyrant,"—and the tyrant in his turn fell after no long reign. In Athens that course of revolution was run; but it did not end as with the rest. The Athenian tyranny gave way to the purest democracy that has ever had trial in the world. ”

“ And we, children of the common stock, sharers in the common heritage, as we see man, Aryan man, in the full growth of his noblest type, we may feel a thrill as we think that Kleisthenês and Periklês were, after all, men of our own blood—as we think that the institutions which grew up under their hands and the institutions under which we ourselves are living are alike branches sprung from one stock, portions of one inheritance in which Athens and England have an equal right. ”

“ The Democracy of Athens was in truth the noblest fruit of that self-developing power of the Greek mind which worked every possession of the common heritage into some new and more brilliant shape, but which learned nothing, nothing of all that formed its real life and its real glory, from the Barbarians of the outer world. Men tell us that Greece learned this or that mechanical invention from Phœnicia or Egypt or Assyria. ”

“ The unfortunate who has no hope of a change for the better has less reason to throw away his life than the prosperous who, if he survive, is always liable to a change for the worse, and to whom any accidental fall makes the most serious difference. To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope. ”

“ The history of the organization of the University and its staff is covered with almost impenetrable mist. For the Museum and Library were in the strictest sense what we should now call an University, and one, too, of the Oxford type, where learned men were invited to take Fellowships, and spend their learned leisure close to observatories in science, and a great library of books. Like the mediæval universities, this endowment of research naturally turned into an engine for teaching, as all who desired knowledge flocked to such a centre, and persuaded the Fellow to become a Tutor. ”

“ With Philip's great son they went forth to a new and higher destiny than the building of petty states. Unwittingly he made conquest of an empire for them, and not for himself. They Hellenized it from the Euxine to the Nile. In Egypt, in Syria, and in Asia Minor, they entered and took possession of every field of activity, an put their impress on every movement of thought. Their philosophy and their literature fed all the intellectual hunger of the age; their energy was its civilizing force. ”

“ As a consequence, it happens to-day that the House of Austria has neither place nor voice in the political organization of Germany; has no footing in Italy; has no dungeons of tyranny in its dominions; has no disciples of Metternich among its statesmen. Its face and its feet are now turned quite away from the paths of ambition and of policy which it trod so long. It has learned, and is learning, so fast that it may yet be a teacher in the school of liberal politics which it entered so late. ”

“ But as an achievement in ocean navigation that voyage of Columbus sinks into insignificance by the side of it, and when the earth was a second time encompassed by the greatest English sailor of his age, the advance in knowledge, as well as the different route chosen, had much reduced the difficulty of the performance. When we consider the frailness of the ships, the immeasurable extent of the unknown, the mutinies that were prevented or quelled, and the hardships that were endured, we can have no hesitation in speaking of Magellan as the prince of navigators. ”

“ As the seat of the most brilliant and popular university, young men of talent and position flocked to her from every quarter, studied for a time within her colonnades, and carried thence the recollection of a culture which was not always deep, not always erudite, but was always and genuinely Attic. To subject to the criticism of this people a doctrine professing to come direct from God, a religion and not a philosophy, depending not on argument but on revelation, was a task of which the difficulties might seem insuperable. ”

“ Menander and his successors—they lasted barely two generations—printed in a few stereotypes a small and very worthless society at Athens. There was no doubt a similar set of people at Corinth, at Thebes, possibly even in the city of Lycurgus. These people, idle, for the most part rich, and in good society, spent their earlier years in debauchery, and their later in sentimental reflections and regrets. They had no serious object in life, and regarded the complications of a love affair as more interesting than the rise and fall of kingdoms or the gain and loss of a nation's liberty. ”