24

THE ANCIENT ORACLES,

[Jan. any one of you; in him ye live, and move, and have your being." "Ye are his offspring;" so said afterwards the ancient Grecian poet whom Paul quotes, and it may have been but an echo from some such earlier voice. This is all imagination, it may be said. If it were so, it would still be a legitimate exercise of the faculty, bringing us nearer, it may be, to the substantial, underlying truth, than any dry rationalizing criticism, or attempted fact-exploration of a region in respect to which history gives us only the most shadowy intimations.

It is worthy of note, too, that to the oak, which was a peculiarity of this place, and which was so closely connected with the earliest Dodonæan worship, there seems to have been attached a primitive sacredness, referred to in the Scriptures, and not condemned until it had become an occasion of idolatry. Abraham dwelt in Aloné Mamre, "in the oaks of Mamre." The place was probably selected by him as one favorable to contemplation and devotion. There came to him the word of the Lord" (Gen. xv, 1), there he had a divine vision, and there God made a covenant with him. It was a most appropriate temple for the divine worship,-shaded, secluded, solemn, while presenting objects suggestive, in the highest degree, of strength and majesty. Under the oak was also a place of burial. Thus Rebecca was buried," and they called its name Aloné Bakoth," the oak of weeping. Under the oak Joshua placed a pillar in commemoration of the Covenant (Josh. xxiv, 26). It was under the oak at Ophrah that the angel gave the oracle to Gideon (Judg. vi, 11). It is spoken of as a well-known place ("the oak which is in Ophrah "), perhaps of solemn convocation; " and there Gideon built an altar.' It was under "the oak of Muzzab, which is in Shechem, that the men of Shechem came to make Abimelech king," Judg. ix, 6. See also 1 Chron. x, 12. When such oaks, or groves of oak, became objects of idolatry and superstition, then was the prophet's denouncing voice lifted against them: "For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which they have loved," Isaiah i, 29. See also Isaiah lvi, 5. The style of condemnation, however, shows that they had once been regarded

with a feeling pure and sacred, before their abuse had brought them under the displeasure of the Almighty.

We may regard it as having been thus comparatively pure among these early sons of Javan. Their oak-worship was a practice, and an idea, which they had carried with them from the fatherland, and here, in the densely shaded Dodona, they found a place beyond most others adapted to its exercise. It degenerated soon into the superstitious worship of the unknown god, and, in proportion as it departed from the primitive simplicity, became irrational, idolatrous, or gloomily ascetic. This religion, however, of Western Greece, never assumed that foul, bacchanalian, purely sensual aspect which characterized the Hellenic heathenism in other parts. With the worship at Dodona, there was ever maintained a rigid austerity, a monastic asceticism even, which gave it dignity, and a moral power, surpassing any that ever came from the fanciful, poetical, merely æsthetic worship of Athens and Corinth. Much as we may condemn the extravagances of such fanaticism, still we are compelled to acknowledge something in it which demands our respect, if not our reverence. We can not think meanly of St. Anthony, or even of Simeon Stylites. And so in the unsandaled, unkempt, and abstemious Selli, the priests or devotees of the Dodonæan Monastery, there must have been a spiritual strength, and a spiritual depth of idea, unknown to all other Greek religion, or even Greek philosophy. Whatever may be its excesses, or delusions, the mortification of the flesh, even as exhibited in those who dwelt in caves and on the tops of pillars,-is still a sublime testimony to the devotees' appreciation of the vastly higher worth of the soul. In the unguarded language of some zealous Protestant writers, asceticism has been denounced as squalid and beastly; yet surely there is nothing in which man differs more directly from the animal, than in the idea of voluntary pain endured for the health of the spirit, real or supposed. The ascetic tendency in the Dodonaan religion, which may be regarded as in this respect standing almost alone in Greece, came doubtless from the shaded, sober, and gloomy character of its origin. Such liability to abuse may have been one cause

of the later condemnation of grove-worship in the Scriptures, though there is evidence that in the East there was no little mingling of sensuality with its rites. The prohibition of it could not have been on account of anything essentially wrong in itself. As our best poet has said,

"The groves were God's first temples;"

and though afterwards this mode of worship was forbidden, as leading the chosen people into those practices of the surrounding nations from which-for reasons having a world-wide interest-they were to be kept separate, still may we hold to the rationality, and comparative innocency, of the feeling which first led to it. It is true that the word most commonly rendered grove in our translation, denotes rather an idol worshiped in such places, than the grove itself; but the idolatry arose out of the corruptions of the original purer observances of devotion in the dense and sombre shades. They became, too, places used for gross, and even obscene rites, for which their darkness and seclusion were most opportune. There does not seem to have been much of this at Dodona, as there was elsewhere in the Tuevos attached to the Grecian temples; but among the idolatrous nations of the East, grove worship was very early perverted to the vilest licentiousness, and so, in the eyes of the Hebrew prophets, it became the very symbol of abomination.

The oracle of Dodona differed from that of Delphi, and others of Greece, in being dedicated alone to Zeus, and in being supposed to receive all its responses from him. Elsewhere, and later, Apollo was the deity mainly consulted. Delphi, however, is not even alluded to in the Iliad or Odyssey, and the mention of it in the Hymns entitled Homeric is an evidence against their title to the name. The fact of Dodona being so exclusively devoted to the supreme deity, whether regarded in the monotheistic or the monarchotheistic aspect, has an important bearing upon the right view of its character and antiquity. It was by far the oldest of the Grecian oracles, and may be regarded as, in some sense, the mother of them all, the primitive source whence the oracular idea had its origin and perpetuation. Eschylus places it away back in the Titanic period. Inachus, the earliest king of Argos, son of

Oceanus and Tethys, consults it in respect to his daughter Io, the mysterious, transformed, wandering woman, whose seed was to deliver Prometheus, the benefactor of mankind. Homer uses it, together with Pelasgian, as an epithet of the most ancient Zeus, the Pelasgian or Javanic Zeus, far back in the ante-Homeric times, before the Cretan apotheosis, before the coming in of that countless mythological rabble of whom Hesiod sings, and with whom Homer himself most inconsistently, and sometimes even grotesquely, associates him. Thus does he invoke this most ancient deity, Iliad, xvi, 233 :

Ζεῦ ἄνα Δωδωναίε Πελασγικό τηλόθι ναίων, Δωδώνης μεδέων δυσχειμέρου· αμφι δε Σελλοὶ Σοὶ ναίουσ' ὑποφῆται ἀνιπτόποδες, χαμαιεῦναι. "O Zeus Dodonæan, Pelasgian, dwelling afar, sovereign of stormy Dodona, around thee dwell the Selli, thy divining prophets, with feet unwashed, lying upon the ground." These Selli were the ascetic priests before mentioned, whose austerity presents such a contrast to the earlier, sensual Greek religion of later days. They are also mentioned by Strabo and others, but there is little more known of them than is called up by these few graphic lines of Homer. The connection of Pelasgian, here, with Dodona, is most significant. In the mind of Homer, this oracle, or sacred place, is associated with the idea of the earlier people, and of a more ancient Zeus whom they worshiped with rites most simple, indeed, but of hoar antiquity. It was remote from the later conception, even of the poet's own day. This Dodonaan, Pelasgian deity was one "who dwelt afar," not so much in geographical space for Dodona could in no sense be called distant to one familiar, as Homer was, with Epirus and the Ionian Isles— but in glory, age, and hight of being. It was some power of whom there had come down a traditional knowledge, as of one who "dwelt afar" from the lowered images of the later mythology, some older, holier, separate deity, transcending the conception entertained of the Idæan or Olympian Zeus, much as that excells the picture given of the other Homeric deities. Even the more common epithets of Zeus, in the Iliad and Odyssey, point to a purer ante-Homeric theology. They were not then first invented. The poet adopts them

just as he finds them in the older hymnic or oracular verse, and strangely mingles them with gross and incongruous fables savoring of a later origin. He doubtless felt the poetical power of this earlier language, and yet, perhaps, without fully appreciating the glory of the ideas they actually expressed, or the greatness of the being to whom they had been applied. They had made their way down to him from the patriarchial times, ever struggling with the surrounding darkness as it became more and more dense, like the pale sunbeams in an eclipse, or the refracted light shining dimly through discoloring and distorting fogs.

A thoughtful man, especially if conversant with the Bible, can not read Homer without feeling that there is something very wonderful here. Even the physical epithets place Zeus far above all other things that are called gods, whether in heaven or upon earth. There is a separating majesty about them which shows that they once were peculiar to a monotheistic belief. All the higher powers of nature are wielded by Jove as his special prerogative, or, if by others, it is only as his delegates or messengers. The names thus derived constantly suggest something corresponding to them in the Old Testament. Thus Zeus is called vegeλnyɛpéra, the "storm gatherer;" "His way is in the whirlwind and the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet." Nah. i, 3. A frequent epithet in Homer is xeλavens, which is almost a literal translation of Ps. xcvii, 2, before cited; "clouds and darkness are round about him," or of Ps. xviii, 12: "He maketh darkness his pavilion, thick clouds of the skies." Homer styles Zeus Evрúona," far-seeing," in space and time; compare the Psalmist, xxxiii, 14: "From his immovable throne he looketh forth upon all the dwellers upon earth." Another epithet is v uédov, "high ruling," or ruling on high; Ps. ciii, 19: "The Lord hath fixed his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom ruleth over all." Zeus is called in Homer vi2vyos, high at the helm, or, more correctly, "high at the scales," the "lofty weigher," of the destinies of men and nations. How impressive and significant is this figure in the Scriptures! "He weigheth the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance." It is not physical objects merely; "He pondereth, (Heb. weigh