and the deceased father-between the mother and daughter-between husband and wife-between life and death! What affecting considerations are suggested by this tenet of religion! My virtue, insignificant being as I am, becomes the common property of Christians; and, as I participate in the guilt of Adam, so also the good that I possess passes to the account of others. Christian poets! the prayers of your Nisus will be felt, in their happy effects, by some Euryalus beyond the grave. The rich, whose charity you describe, may well share their abundance with the poor; for the pleasure which they take in performing this simple and grateful act, will receive its reward from the Almighty in the release of their parents from the expiatory flame. What a beautiful feature in our religion, to impel the heart of man to virtue by the power of love, and to make him feel that the very coin which gives bread for the moment to an indigent fellow-being, entitles perhaps some rescued soul to an eternal position at the table of the Lord!

CHAPTER XVI.

PARADISE.

THE characteristic which essentially distinguishes Paradise from Elysium is this, that in the former the righteous souls dwell in heaven with God and the angels, whereas in the latter the happy shades are separated from Olympus. The philosophic system of Plato and Pythagoras, which divides the soul into two essences—the subtle form, which flies beneath the moon, and the spirit, which ascends to the Divinity,-this system is not within our province, which embraces the poetical theology alone.

We have shown in various parts of this work the difference which exists between the felicity of the elect and that of the manes in Elysium. 'Tis one thing to dance and to feast, and another to know the nature of things, to penetrate into the secrets of futurity, to contemplate the revolutions of the spheres-in a word, to be associated in the omniscience if not in the omni

potence, of the Eternal. It is, however, not a little extraordinary that, with so many advantages, the Christian poets have all been unsuccessful in their description of heaven. Some have failed through timidity, as Tasso and Milton; others from fatigue, as Dante; from a philosophical spirit, as Voltaire; or from overdrawing the picture, as Klopstock. This subject, therefore, must involve some hidden difficulty, in regard to which we shall offer the following conjectures :

It is natural to man to show his sympathy only in those things which bear some relation to him and which affect him in a particular way, for instance, misfortune. Heaven, the seat of unbounded felicity, is too much above the human condition for the soul to be touched by it; we feel but little interest in beings perfectly happy. On this account, the poets have always succeeded better in the description of hell; humanity, at least, is here, and the torments of the wicked remind us of the afflictions of life; we are affected by the woes of others, like the slaves of Achilles, who, while shedding many tears for the death of Patroclus, secretly deplored their own unhappy lot.

To avoid the coldness resulting from the eternal and ever uniform felicity of the just, the poet might contrive to introduce into heaven some kind of hope or expectation of superior happiness, or of some grand unknown epoch in the revolution of beings; he might remind the reader more frequently of human things, either by drawing comparisons or by giving affections. and even passions to the blessed. Scripture itself mentions the hopes and the sacred sorrows of heaven. Why should there not be in paradise tears such as saints might be capable of shedding?"

It is singular enough that Chapelain, who has produced choirs of martyrs, virgins, and apostles, has alone represented the Christian paradise in its true light.

2 The essential happiness of the blessed in heaven, viz., that which consists in the intuitive vision of God, cannot be increased either before or after the resurrection; but their accidental happiness, or that which may be derived from creatures, is susceptible of augmentation; for instance, when they witness the conversion of sinners, or behold new saints, especially their own relatives or friends, added to the number of the elect. Such events cannot fail to heighten their joy, on account of the love which they have for God and for their neighbor. In this sense only can there be any hope in heaven. (See Witasse, de Deo., quæst. xi. sect. xii.) T.

3 Milton has seized this idea when he represents the angels dismayed at the

By these various means he would produce harmonies between our feeble nature and a more sublime constitution, between our shortlived existence and eternal things; we should be less disposed to consider as an agreeable fiction a happiness which, like our own, would be mingled with vicissitudes and tears.

From all these considerations on the employment of the Christian marvellous in poetry, we may at least doubt whether the marvellous of Paganism possesses so great an advantage over it as has generally been supposed. Milton, with all his faults, is everlastingly opposed to Homer, with all his beauties. But suppose for a moment that the bard of Eden had been born in France, that he had flourished during the age of Louis XIV., and that with the native grandeur of his genius he had combined the taste of Racine and Boileau; we ask, what in this case the Paradise Lost would have been, and whether the marvellous of that poem would not have equalled the marvellous of the Iliad and Odyssey? If we formed our judgment of mythology from the Pharsalia, or even from the Eneid, would we have that brilliant idea of it which is conveyed by the father of the graces, the inventor of the cestus of Venus? When we possess a work on a Christian subject as perfect in its kind as the performances of Homer, we will then have a fair opportunity of deciding between the marvellous of fable and the marvellous of our own religion; and till then we shall take the liberty of doubting the truth of that precept of Boileau :

The awful mysteries of the Christian's faith
Admit not of the lighter ornaments.

We might, indeed, have abstained from bringing Christianity into the lists against mythology, on the single question concerning the marvellous. If we have entered into this subject, it is only to exhibit the superabundant resources of our cause. We might cut short the question in a simple and decisive manner; for were it as certain as it is doubtful that Christianity is incapable of furnishing as rich a marvellous as that of fable, still it is true that it possesses a certain poetry of the soul, an imagination of the heart, of which no trace is to be found in mythology; and the impressive beauties which emanate from this source would intelligence of the fall of man; and Fénélon in like manner assigns emotions of pity to the happy shades.

alone compensate the loss of the ingenious fictions of antiquity. In the pictures of paganism, every thing has a physical character, every thing is external and adapted only to the eye; in the delineations of the Christian religion, all is sentiment and mind, all is internal, all is created for the soul. What food for thought! what depth of meditation! There is more sweetness in one of those divine tears which Christianity draws from the eyes of the believer than in all the smiling errors of mythology. A poet has only to contemplate the Mother of Sorrows, or some obscure saint, the patron of the blind and the orphan, to compose a more affecting work than with all the gods of the Pantheon. Is there not poetry here? Do we not find here also the marvellous? But, if you would have a marvellous still more sublime, contemplate the life, actions, and sufferings of the Redeemer, and recollect that your God bore the appellation of the Son of man! Yes, we venture to predict that a time will come when men will be lost in astonishment to think how they could have overlooked the admirable beauties which exist in the mere names, in the mere expressions, of Christianity, and will be scarcely able to conceive how it was possible to aim the shafts of ridicule at this religion of reason and of misfortune.1

Here we conclude the survey of the direct relations between Christianity and the Muses, having considered it in its relations to men and in its relations to supernatural beings. We shall close our remarks on this subject with a general view of the Bible, the source whence Milton, Dante, Tasso, and Racine, derived a part of their wonderful imagery, as the great poets of antiquity had borrowed their grandest traits from the works of Homer.

The religion of reason or truth, established by the Son of God, must, by its very nature, be always a butt of opposition for every variety of religious error, and consequently expose its professors to obloquy and persecution. It is therefore a religion of misfortune or suffering, as well as of reason or truth. Our Saviour himself announced this external characteristic of his church, and it is a source of immense consolation to its faithful but persecuted members of the present day to recall those words, "You shall be hated by all men for my name's sake." On the other hand, it is a melancholy evidence of the strange blindness that seizes upon the mind, that there are men who boast of their Christianity, and yet, despite the positive declarations of Christ, do not recognise in the storm of opposition continually raging against the Church one of the most striking characteristics of its truth. (See St. Matt. x.) T.

BOOK V.

THE BIBLE AND HOMER.

CHAPTER I.

OF THE SCRIPTURES AND THEIR EXCELLENCE.

How extraordinary that work which begins with Genesis and ends with the Apocalypse! which opens in the most perspicuous style, and concludes in the most figurative language! May we not justly assert that in the books of Moses all is grand and simple, like that creation of the world and that innocence of primitive mortals which he describes, and that all is terrible and supernatural in the last of the prophets, like that corrupt society and that consummation of ages which he has represented?

The productions most foreign to our manners, the sacred books of infidel nations, the Zendavesta of the Parsees, the Vidam of the Brahmins, the Coran of the Turks, the Edda of the Scandinavians, the maxims of Confucius, the Sanscrit poems, excite in us no surprise. We find in all these works the ordinary chain of human ideas; they have all some resemblance to each other both in tone and idea. The Bible alone is like none of them; it is a monument detached from all the others. Explain it to a Tartar, to a Caffre, to an American savage; put it into the hands of a bonze or a dervise; they will be all equally astonished by it - fact which borders on the miraculous. Twenty authors, living at periods very distant from one another, composed the sacred books; and, though they are written in twenty different styles, yet these styles, equally inimitable, are not to be met with in any other performance. The New Testament, so different in its spirit from the Old, nevertheless partakes with the latter of this astonishing originality.

But this is not the only extraordinary thing which men unanimously discover in the Scriptures. Those who do not believe