powerful element of restraint and some sufficiently daring faith in spiritual reality, Hellenism sank back upon the mere earth, and its dying fires lit up a world too sordid for their sacred flame.  In Marius the Epicurean the one thing lacking was supplied by the faith of early Christianity.  The Greek idealism of beauty was not only conserved but enriched, and the human spirit was revived, by that heroic faith which endured as seeing the invisible.  The two Fausts revealed the struggle at later stages of the development of Christianity.  Marlowe’s showed it under the light of mediaeval theology and Goethe’s under that of modern humanism, with the curious result that in the former tragedy the man is the pagan and the devil the idealist, while in the latter this order is reversed.  Omar Khayyam and Fiona Macleod introduce the Oriental and the Celtic strains.  In both there is the cry of the senses and the strong desire and allurement of the green earth; but in Fiona Macleod there is the dominant undertone of the eternal and the spiritual, never silent and finally overwhelming.

The next two lectures, in a cross-section of the seventeenth century, showed John Bunyan keenly alive to the literature and the life of the world of Charles the Second’s time, yet burning straight flame of spiritual idealism with these for fuel.  Over against him stood Samuel Pepys, lusty and most amusing, declaring in every page of his Diary the lengths to which unblushing paganism can go.

Representative of modern literature, Carlyle comes first with his Sartor Resartus.  At the ominous and uncertain beginning of our modern thought he stood, blowing loud upon his iron trumpet a great blast of harsh but grand idealism, before which the walls of the pagan Jericho fell down in many places.  Yet such an inspiring challenge as his was bound to produce reactions, and we have them in many forms.  Matthew Arnold presses upon his time, in clear and unimpassioned voice, the claim of neglected Hellenism.  Rossetti, with heavy, half-closed eyes, hardly distinguishes the body from the soul.  Mr. Thomas Hardy, the Titan of the modern world, whose heart is sore with disillusion and the bitterness of the earth, and yet blind to the light of heaven that still shines upon it, has lived into the generation which is reading Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw.  These appear to be outside of all such distinctions as pagan and idealist; but their influence is strongly on the pagan side.  Mr. Chesterton appears, with his quest of human nature, and he finds it not on earth but in heaven.  He is the David of Christian faith, come to fight against the heretic Goliaths of his day; and, so far as his style and literary manner go, he continues the ancient role, smiting Goliath with his own sword.