TH OF THE GODS.

Certain authors have declared that, shortly before the triumph of
Christianity, a voice mysterious ran along the shores of the AEgean
Sea, crying, "Great Pan is dead!" The old universal god of nature was
no more; and great was the joy thereat. Men fancied that with the
death of nature temptation itself was dead. After the troublings of so
long a storm, the soul of man was at length to find rest.

Was it merely a question touching the end of that old worship, its
overthrow, and the eclipse of old religious rites? By no means.
Consult the earliest Christian records, and in every line you may read
the hope, that nature is about to vanish, life to be extinguished;
that the end of the world, in short, is very near. It is all over with
the gods of life, who have spun out its mockeries to such a length.
Everything is falling, breaking up, rushing down headlong. The whole
is becoming as nought: "Great Pan is dead!"

It was nothing new that the gods must perish. Many an ancient worship
was grounded in that very idea. Osiris, Adonis die indeed in order to
rise again. On the stage itself, in plays which were only acted for
the feast days of the gods, AEschylus expressly averred by the mouth of
Prometheus, that some day they should suffer death: but how? As
conquered and laid low by the Titans, the ancient powers of nature.

Here, however, things are quite otherwise. Alike in generals and
particulars, in the past and the future, would the early Christians
have cursed Nature herself. So utterly did they condemn her, as to
find the Devil incarnate in a flower. Swiftly may the angels come
again, who erst overwhelmed the cities of the Dead Sea! Oh, that they
may sweep off, may crumple up as a veil the hollow frame of this
world; may at length deliver the saints from their long trial!

The Evangelist said, "The day is coming:" the Fathers, "It is coming
immediately." From the breaking-up of the Empire and the invasion of
the Barbarians, St. Augustin draws the hope that very soon no city
would remain but the city of God.

And yet, how hard of dying is the world; how stubbornly bent on
living! Like Hezekiah, it begs a respite, one turn more of the dial.
Well, then, be it so until the year one thousand. But thereafter, not
one day.

* * * * *

Are we quite sure of what has been so often repeated, that the gods of
old had come to an end, themselves wearied and sickened of living;
t