The air no more begets the winged tribes;
Then He who all destroyed, shall all restore."
We shall find expressions similar to these also in the Orphic hymns, written as follows:
"For having hidden all, brought them again
To gladsome light, forth from his sacred heart,
Solicitous."
And if we live throughout holily and righteously, we are happy here, and shall be happier after our departure hence; not possessing happiness for a time, but enabled to rest in eternity.
"At the same hearth and table as the rest
Of the immortal gods, we sit all free
Of human ills, unharmed,"
says the philosophic poetry of Empedocles. And so, according to the Greeks, none is so great as to be above judgment, none so insignificant as to escape its notice.
And the same Orpheus speaks thus:
"But to the word divine, looking, attend,
Keeping aright the heart's receptacle
Of intellect, and tread the straight path well,
And only to the world's immortal King
Direct thy gaze."[1]
And again, respecting God, saying that He was invisible, and that He was known to but one, a Chaldean by race—meaning either by this Abraham or his son—he speaks as follows:
"But one a scion of Chaldean race;
For he the sun's path knew right well,
And how the motion of the sphere about
The earth proceeds, in circle moving
Equally around its axis, how the winds
Their chariot guide o'er air and sea."
Then, as if paraphrasing the expression, "Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool,"[2] he adds:
Upon a throne of gold, and 'neath His feet
- ↑ Quoted in Exhortation, p. 74.
- ↑ Isa. lxvi. 1.
