T. R. Glover

“ Virgil was born in the year 70 B.C.—the son of a little self-made man in a village North of the Po. He grew up in the country, with a spirit that year by year grew more sensitive to every aspect of the world around him. No Roman poet had a more gentle and sympathetic love of Nature; none ever entered so deeply and so tenderly into the sorrows of men. He lived through forty years of Civil War, veiled and open. He saw its effects in broken homes and aching hearts, in coarsened minds and reckless lives. He was driven from his own farm, and had, like Æneas, to rescue an aged and blind father. ”

“ To lie against God as if He forbade us to do good on the Sabbath day, is not that impiety? To brag that the mutilation of the flesh is a proof of election—as if God specially loved them for it—ridiculous! And that they should keep a look-out on the stars and the moon and so observe months and days and distinguish the ordinances of God and the changes of the seasons, as their impulses prompt them to make some into feasts and some into times of mourning—who would count this a mark of piety towards God and not much rather of folly? ”

“ But when one reflects upon the tender hearts to be found in the literature of the century, it is difficult to think that Lucian can have had any effect on the mass of serious people, unless to quicken in them by repulsion the desire for something less terrible than a godless world of mockery and death, and the impulse to seek it in the ancestral faith of their fathers. He did not love men enough to understand their inmost mind. The instincts that drove men back upon the old religion were among the deepest in human nature, and of their strength Lucian had no idea. ”

“ Let us forbid to take napkins and strigils to Jove, to hold the mirror to Juno. God seeks none to minister to him; nay! himself he ministers to mankind; everywhere he is, at the side of every man. Let a man hear what mode to keep in sacrifices, how far to avoid wearisomeness and superstition: never will enough be done, unless in his mind he shall have conceived God as he ought, as in possession of all things, as giving all things freely. What cause is there that the gods should do good? Nature. He errs, who thinks they can not do harm; they will not. They cannot receive an injury nor do one. ”

“ He, the poet to whom man and the world were most various and meant most, came to his people, and, without any articulate expression of it in direct words, made it clear to them that he had felt a gap in the heart of things, which philosophy could never fill. Philosophy could remove this sense of incompleteness, but only at the cost of love; and love was to Virgil, as his poetry shows, the very essence of life. ”

“ The quick movement of his thought, his sudden flashes of anger and of tenderness, his apostrophes, his ejaculations—one feels that pen and paper never got such a man written down before or since. Every sentence comes charged with the whole man—half a dozen Greek words, and not always the best Greek—and the Christian world for ever will sum up its deepest experience in "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world." ”

“ At one stroke Israel was abolished, and every national memory and every national instinct, rooted in a past of suffering and revelation, and watered with tears in a present of pain, were to wither like the gardens of Adonis. No man with a human heart but must face the alternative of surrendering national for Christian ideals, or hating and exterminating the enemy of his race. ”

“ Much might be said in criticism of Paul's Christology—if it were not for Paul and his followers. They have done too much and been too much for it to be possible to dissect their great conception in cold blood. Paul's theories are truer than another man's experiences—they pulse with life, they have (in Luther's phrase) hands and feet to carry a man away. The man is so large and so strong, so simple and true, so various in his knowledge of the world, so tender in his feeling for men—"all things to all men"—such a master of language, so sympathetic and so open—he is irresistible. ”

“ Ten months later Seneca wrote his tractate on Clemency. Nero should ask himself "Am I the elected of the gods to be their vice-gerent on earth? The arbiter of life and death to the nations?" and so forth. He is gently reminded of the great light that fronts the throne; that his anger would be as disastrous as war; that "Kings gain from kindness a greater security, while their cruelty swells the number of their enemies." Seneca wanders a good deal, but his drift is clear—and the wretchedness of his position. ”

“ It took centuries to achieve a uniform account of the Christian faith.
The unity of the early church lay in the reconciliation with God, in the holy spirit, and Jesus Christ,—a unity soon felt and treasured. "There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all." ”

“ Jesus never uses the name Father without an air of gladness. Men are anxious as to what they shall eat, and what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be clothed—"your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Children ask father and mother for bread—will they receive a stone? The women had hid the leaven in the three measures of meal long before the children began to feel hungry. And as to clothes—God has clothed the flower far better than Solomon ever clothed himself, "and shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" ”

“ Here was a poet who loved Rome more than ever did Augustus or Horace, and he had no such speedy cure as they for "the woes of sorrowful Hesperia." The loss of faith in the old gods meant more to him than to them, so his tone in speaking of them is quieter, a great deal, than that of Horace. He took the decline of morals more seriously and more inwardly, and he saw more deeply into the springs of action; he could never lightly use the talk of rapid and sweeping reformation, as his friend did in the odes which the Emperor inspired. ”

“ At the cost of a little study of human character, and close reading of the Synoptists, and some careful imagination, it is possible to see him as he spoke,—the flash of the eye, the smile on the lip, the gesture of the hand, all the natural expression of himself and his thought that a man unconsciously gives in speaking, when he has forgotten himself in his matter and his hearer—his physiognomy, in fact. ”

“ To be godlike, a man had to suppress his affections just as he suppressed his own sensations of pain or hunger. Every human instinct of paternal or conjugal love, of friendship, of sympathy, of pity, was thus brought to the test of a Reason, which had two catch-words by which to try them—the "Universe" and "the things in your own power"—and the sentence was swift and summary enough. They did not realize that for most men—and probably it is truest of the best men—Life moves onward with all its tender and gracious instincts, while Analysis limps behind. ”

“ If, by establishing his contention against the Jew, the Christian could achieve another end, and could demonstrate to the Greek that he too had a history and a literature, that his religion was no mere accident of a day, but was rooted in the past, that it had been foretold by God himself, and was part of the divine scheme for the destiny of mankind, then, resting on the sure ground of Providence made plain, he could call upon the Greek in his turn to forsake his errors and superstitions for the first of all religions, which should also be the last—the faith of Jesus Christ. ”

“ No act of piety is it to be often seen with veiled head turning toward a stone, to haunt every altar, to lie prostrate on the ground with hands outspread before the shrines of gods, to sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts and link vow to vow—no! rather to be able to look on all things with a mind at peace." [88] And a mind at peace was the last thing that contemporary religion could offer to any one. ”

“ For the Son of God never moves from his watch-tower, being never divided, never dissevered, never passing from place to place, but existing everywhere at all times and free from all limitations. He is all reason, all eye, all light from the Father, seeing all things, hearing all things, knowing all things, with power searching the powers. To him is subjected the whole army of angels and of gods—to him, the Word of the Father, who has received the holy administration by reason of Him who subjected it to him ”

“ Even when his daughter Tullia died, no sign of any hope of re-union escaped him in his letters, nor did Servius Sulpicius, who wrote him a beautiful letter of consolation, do more than merely hint at such a thing. "If the dead have consciousness, would she wish you to be so overcome of sorrow?" Horace, whose odes, as we have seen, are now and then consecrated to the restoration of religion, was every whit as secular-minded. He laughed at superstition and ridiculed the idea of a divine interest in men, when he expressed his own feeling. ”

“ The historic Jesus is never of such consequence to us as when the great intellects tell us that the true and only heaven is Nephelococcygia. For Aristophanes was right—it was the real Paradise of the Greek mind. What relief the plain matter-of-fact Gospel must have brought men in a world, where nothing throve like these cities of the clouds, would be inconceivable, if we did not know its value still. While we recognize the real contribution of the Greek Christians, it is good to see what Christianity meant to men who were not Greeks. ”

“ Old desires passed away and a new life began, in which passion took a new direction, finding its centre of warmth and light, not in morality, not in religion, but in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. "To me to live is Christ," cried Paul, giving words to the experience of countless others. Life had a new centre; and duty, pain and death were turned to gladness. The early Christian was conscious of a new spirit within him. It was by this spirit that they could cry "Abba, Father"; it was the spirit that guided them into all truth ”

“ An expatriated adventurer, living for twenty years on his eloquence, with the merest smattering of philosophy and no interest whatever in nature and natural science or mathematics, with little feeling and no poetry,—it was hardly to be expected that he should understand the depths of the human soul, lynx-eyed as he is for the surface of things. He had a very frank admiration for his own character, and he drew himself over and over again under various names. Lykinos, for example, is hardly a disguise at all. ”

“ The force with which he flings himself against the doctrine of a future life shows that it is a fight for freedom. If men would rid themselves of "the dread of something after death"—and they could if they would, for reason will do it—they could live in "the serene temples of the wise"; the gods would pass from their minds; bereavement would lose its sting, and life would no longer be brutalized by the cruelties of terror. ”

“ He has not lost all the traces of the years during which he consorted with Rhetoric; at times he amplifies and exaggerates, and will strain for more point and piquancy than a taste more sure would approve. Yet he has the instinct to avoid travesty, and his style is in general natural and simple, despite occasional literary reminiscences. His characters talk,—as men may talk of their affairs, when they are not conscious of being overheard,—with a naïve frankness not always very wise, with a freedom and common sense, and sometimes with a folly, that together reveal the speaker. ”

“ The good man's part is then to commit himself to fate—it is a great comfort to be carried along with the universe. Whatever it is that has bidden us thus to live and thus to die, by the same necessity it binds the gods. An onward course that may not be stayed sweeps on human and divine alike. The very founder and ruler of all things has written fate, but he follows it: he ever obeys, he once commanded. ”

“ It was difficult to cut the connexion with Greek tradition—how difficult, we see in Plutarch's case. The Stoics, however, fell between two stools, for they had not enough feeling for the past to satisfy the pious and patriotic, nor the resolution to be done with it. After all, more help was to be had from Lucretius than from Epictetus in ridding the mind of the paralysis of polytheism.
But the same instinct that made men demand immortality for themselves, a feeling, dim but strong, of the value of personality and of love, compelled them to seek personality in the divine. ”

“ We hear the tones of the old man, and can recognize "the mind and the outspokenness," which Arrian cherished in memory—we understand why, as we read. The high moral sense of the teacher, his bursts of eloquence, his shrewdness, his abrupt turns of speech, his apostrophes—"Slave!" he cries, as he addresses the weakling—his diminutives of derision, produce the most lively sense of a personality. There is wit, too, but like Stoic wit in general it is hard and not very sympathetic; it has nothing of the charm and delicacy of Plato's humour, nor of its kindliness. ”

“ For centuries the great men of Greek letters were natives of every region of the eastern Mediterranean except Greece, and Plutarch stands alone in later literature a Hellen of the motherland—Greek by blood, birth, home and instinct, proud of his race and his land, of their history, their art and their literature. When we speak of the influence of the past, it is well to remember to how great a past this man looked back, and from what a present. ”

“ Under a weak, or a careless, or even an absent, Emperor Rome was governed by such men and such methods as we suppose to be peculiar to Sultanates and the East.
The honour, the property, the life of every Roman lay in the hands of eunuchs and valets, and, as these quarrelled or made friends, the fortunes of an old nobility changed with the hour. It had not been so under Augustus, nor was it so under Vespasian, nor under Trajan or his successors; but for the greater part of the first century A.D. Rome was governed by weak or vicious Emperors, and they by their servants. ”