quered race, or paramount state in the confederacy. Their principle was respect and justice to the inferior, protection to the weak, and true organization for life. With the rich humor and pure mirthfulness known only to the serious and chaste, they were severe without austerity; simple in private life, that they might be splendid in all that pertained to religious rites and public duties; with pure and dignified relations of friendship, realized on both sides, by husbands and wives, by the unmarried of both sexes, and by the old and the young. Virtue, in the strict sense of the word, seems never to have pervaded any society, ancient or modern, so completely as it did the Dorian. For, if friendship—and not philanthropy, or the charity which is founded on the Christian's faith and hope—was their highest social characteristic, yet, on the other hand, must be subtracted from their condition those depths of spiritual vice and social wrong, to which the eternities, unfolded by the same hope and faith, have opened the passions of Christendom.
But the question for us is, whether, on the new platform upon which Christendom finds itself, now that the spiritual future has descended as it were into human life, there may not be found a harmony corresponding to the Dorian measure;—whether there may not be a social organization which does as much justice to the Christian religion and philosophy, as the Dorian state did to Apollo. We have seen, that there is a correspondence, point by point, between Apollo and Christ. Christ attacked sin, as Apollo attacked the Pythoness; and, in the contest, the serpent bruised his heel. Christ "descended into hell," as Apollo served Admetus. The humiliation was temporary; the triumph proved the God. It is the only Pagan religion which can be brought into any comparison with Christianity, because it is the only one which involves the contemplation of man in an objective relation with Divinity; and its inferiority consists, not in its leaving out the antagonism,—rather the triplicity of life; for it did not do this,—but in its not estimating the infinite reach of passion. The Dorians do not represent, all of humanity: they were of an exceptional organization. Apollo was not "tempted in all points, like as we are." He was not all of
