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if so much is accomplished by a poor religion, a better one, under equally favorable conditions, ought to accomplish still "Xaleлa τa xala," said Plato; the beautiful things are the hard things. This plan is better than the former, and therefore more difficult; for that very reason its adoption is ultimately probable.

On the general optimistic principle that the world is improv ing, and that the ideal of the present will be the reality of the future, we are willing to believe that the church will one day possess something of the devotional spirit which led the disciples at Jerusalem not only to forget differences of wealth, but to annihilate them, and which is said to have led the refugees of the Roman Catacombs to organize a commune beneath the ground above which a despotism was established. There will be social intercourse indeed, but founded on religion. Struggling attempts at sociables may cease, but prayer-meetings will flourish; elements uncongenial in a drawing-room, will become congenial in a house of worship. The church will lose not only in the elegance of its furnishings, but also in the average refinement of its members; but for every step which it shall take downward, according to the standard of the world, it will take a step upward, according to the standard of its founder, till, attaining again the ideal which it realized, for a brief season in the past, it shall gather the few rich, and the many poor, into a company in which the flippant ties of polite society will be utterly impossible, but in which the deep bond of spiritual brotherhood will be forever assured.

ARTICLE II.-PROF. ERNST CURTIUS ON WORK AND

LEISURE.

Translation of an Oration delivered on the birthday of the Emperor William, in the Aula of the University of Berlin, March 22, 1875, by Prof. ERNST CURTIUS, of the University of Berlin, author of History of Greece, etc., etc.

WORK and rest form an antithesis which rules human life. Not an antithesis established by physical law, like the ebb and flow of the tides, and the inspiration and expiration of the breath, but one connected with the human will. Upon this rests its importance in the field of morals; it is on this account that we estimate the culture of a man by the way in which he spends his leisure, and the proper division of one's time, between employment and repose, remains one of the most important problems in the art of living. As we are assembled here to-day, after the winter's labors, to celebrate, in a delightful calm, an occasion to which we desire to give, by a scholarly consideration, the appropriate festal tone, I beg leave to turn your attention to the place which Rest or Leisure takes in the life of man, and also how, in their conception of it, various races and periods differ and agree.

In general, it may be said that races and countries are distinguished by this: whether they allow labor to present itself at the expense of leisure, or whether leisure takes rank of labor. Any one who regards for a moment the winter of a northern city will admit that even social recreation is conducted with such an expenditure of force that leisure becomes labor. When a southerner returns from us to his native climate, he is accustomed to complain that he cannot long continue there the concentrated mental activity to which he had here become inured, and labor with him gradually transforms itself into the habit of filling up, as caprice may dictate, his unoccupied hours.

It is true this difference does not rest absolutely upon the latitude and average thermometer of a country; even in the hot zones there have been intense thought and action as long

as the national stamina was unbroken. This is proven by the heroic traditions of India. In these, work and rest are fully developed, and have attained a most fruitful reciprocal influence, the one preparing for and enlarging the other. For wherever poetry flourishes it is the fruit of dignified rest, and heroic song is inconceivable without heroic deeds. In the historical period, however, the antithesis which is indispensable to every healthy national life vanishes, and we see how the goal of endeavor is no longer set in the accomplishment of definite, practical aims, but in a self-surrender annihilating the personal will, and deadening all individual energy, to the contemplation of the super-sensual, in the ever completer return of the individual existence into the Deity.

But how completely this conception is interwoven into the texture of the national character is seen by this, that the protest against Brahmanism, the new representation of God and Nature, which Buddhism brought forward, in this respect reaches the same result, for its ideal is also an extinction of individuality, a dying to this world, an eradication of all desires, of all motives to action, and the cessation of action itself. And although among more energetic primitive races to whom this ideal was not attractive, in its place there came a more general notion of happiness and joy, yet in India itself this notion has always maintained its oriental character, according to which entire apathy is the necessary presupposition of a happy existence, and consequently the alternation of labor and rest is done away with.

Very different was the state of things among the mountaintribes of Iran, the Medes and Persians, as long as their national spirit was unbroken. To these a down-hearted despondency, a dull indifference was impossible. Here every individual was drawn into the antagonism which divided the spiritual world as well as nationalities into two opposed camps. Religion demanded partisanship and conflict; she demanded unrepining labor in field, forest, and garden; she interdicted only sordid, avaricious toil, and that contemplative devotion which made up the life of the inhabitants of India, was relegated to holidays.

Thus, there was established a simple and rational system of living, a regulation, a reduction to order of the manifold acts

of human life, which has repeated itself in every branch of the Aryan race; even amongst the Greeks, during the period when, as Pelasgi they were actually tillers of the soil and cultivated the land with their own hands. In this condition a great part of the people remained for a long time; those, however, with whom the Persians came into contact, the Greeks settled upon the island and adjacent shores, more than any other member of the great Aryan race, had already come under the influence. of those seafaring Semites, who introduced trade and manufactures into the Archipelago and with their disquiet and tumult filled the Greek world. The inart of commerce now became the central point for all the cities of the coast, and because the Persian king under these circumstances first became acquainted with the Greeks, he despised them, according to Herodotus, as a degenerate people, not in a condition to present a manly and permanent resistance to his arms.

Cyrus saw only the dark side, and it is undeniable that commerce, which has no regular succession of labor and leisure, no determinate times and seasons such as agriculture compels, early attacked the moral health of the Greeks, and essentially changed their original ethnic character. On the other hand, the versatility and fecundity of the old Greek life rests upon the fact that it includes two distinct circles of culture, and we plainly recognize in it a double drift, first the Aryan pride which despised all mercantile and mechanical pursuits, and then the thrifty industry learnt from the Phoenicians, which with restless activity sought to utilize everything Nature offered or diligence could procure.

This duality produced a healthy fermentation; it stimulated both reflection and action, and in the endeavor to reconcile and unite these two tendencies the Greeks were lifted above the narrowness of ancient life; they were the first clearly to survey the different avenues of human existence, the various lines. and directions of human energy, and to establish thereupon an especial order of life, a plan of living. And it is remarkable how to this end they subsidized foreign elements. From the Phoenicians they learnt kidnapping and the slave trade. In this way arose a class of homeless, expatriated human beings, upon whom the native citizens could shuffle off the whole bur

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den of daily labor. From this time men were divided into two classes, those who had leisure and those who had none. "The bondman," says Aristotle, "has no leisure; for him there are only working-hours and pauses in working." Neither is there leisure for immature age. Only the fully developed freeman can enter upon its enjoyment, as the heir at majority receives his inheritance. Leisure is the highest of all goods, it is the true life, because it alone permits free control over one's time and force. But this treasure must be wisely managed, and for this there must be a preparatory schooling. A worthy meaning, something noble as object must be given to leisure, or the man who enjoys it is ruined. This consequently is the new meaning which the Hellenes gave to rest, that it is no longer the antithesis of exertion, as among barbarians, who, after labor, know of nothing better than to give themselves up to gluttony, drunkenness, and stupid indolence. The Greeks recognized this fact, that without activity there can be no real enjoyment of life. Leisure, rest, consequently was to be only another form of action. The activity of leisure, however, has this peculiarity, that it is produced by no sort of outward circumstances, but is a voluntary, spontaneous, and cheerful movement, consequently neither capricious or unregulated, but rather an activity so ordered and arranged that under it all the spiritual and bodily powers develope themselves harmoniously. While the Greeks to this end set up certain rules and standards, which were correspondent to their national character, they matured and perfected the enjoyment of leisure, till it became a national art, which more than everything else gave expression to the spirit and genius of the Hellenic people. To gymnastics, which compel the physical organs to a harmonious energy, and become thereby an inexhaustible source of enlivening satisfaction, there corresponds the spiritual and mental activity, free, self-regulative, disciplined, which gives to leisure not form and contents only, but even a consecration. It is the province of Music, as Aristotle says, to teach men how to be glad in the right way. This is the explanation of the importance of the harp in the old Greek life. Compared with the appliances of modern musical art, the seven-stringed lyre was but a poor thing, yet where has an inferior instrument dis.