with it. They hold out little children to have their right hands purified in the same way. Those who cannot reach the flame, strive to touch the hands of others who are more fortunate. They reverently kiss the very stones blackened by the smoke of these lamps.

On the festival of Sheik Adi, his tomb is visited by long processions of priests in white linen robes, musicians with pipes and tambourines, and pilgrims from all their districts. Peddlers congregate there to sell their wares. Sheiks and priests walk familiarly among the people, or sit talking with them in the shadows of the trees. Seven or eight thousand usually meet together on this occasion, and it is a picturesque sight to see them wandering about among the trees and rocks with their lighted torches. Layard thus describes some of the religious ceremonies he witnessed at this festival: "Thousands of lights danced in the distance, glimmered among the trees, and were reflected in the fountains and streams. Suddenly all voices were hushed. A solemn strain of sweet pathetic music came from the tomb of the saint; the voices of men and women in harmony with flutes. At measured intervals, the song was broken by the loud clash of cymbals and tambourines; and then those without the precincts of the tomb joined in the melody. The same slow and solemn strain, occasionally varied, lasted nearly an hour. Gradually, the chant gave way to a lively melody, ever increasing in quickness. Voices were raised to the highest pitch; women made the rocks resound with their shrill tones; men among the multitude without joined in the cry; tambourines were beaten with extraordinary energy; musicians strained their limbs in violent. contortions, till they fell exhausted on the ground. I never heard a more frightful yell than rose in that valley. It was midnight. There were no immodest gestures or unseemly ceremonies. When musicians and singers were exhausted, the sounds died away, groups scattered about the valley, and resumed their previous cheerfulness."

The Yezidis are remarkable for tenacious attachment to their religion. A person of mature age among them never

renounces his faith. They have often been subjected to terrible tortures, but have invariably preferred death to the adoption of any other form of worship. Even when young children are carried off and sold to Turkish harems, they often cherish through life the religion of their childhood, and contrive to keep up a secret communication with their priests.

GREECE AND ROME.

Man gifted Nature with divinity,

To lift and link her to the breast of love;
All things betrayed to the initiate eye

The tracks of gods above.

Not to that culture gay,

Stern self-denial, or sharp penance wan.
Well might each heart be happy in that day;

For gods, the happy ones, were kin to man.
SCHILLER'S Gods of Greece.

GREECE was the oldest European nation. Its history extends a little more than one thousand eight hundred years before Christ; two hundred years earlier than Moses; but they were a rude people at that time, dwelling in huts and caves. Being settled by colonies from Egypt, Phoenicia, Thrace, and other countries, their religious customs and opinions varied considerably in different states; but the general features were similar. They worshipped many deities, all intended to represent the divine energy acting in various departments of the universe. A few enlightened minds among them taught that these all proceeded from One Central Source of Being; and this belief, confused and dim at first, became more distinct as knowledge increased.

Athens was founded by a colony from Egypt, and the intercourse between that country and Greece was always frequent. The effect of this on their religion and philosophy is very obvious. But in the Grecian atmosphere of thought and feeling all things were tinged with more cheerful and poetic colours. Egyptian reverence for stability and power was here changed to worship of freedom.

and beauty. Strong, active, and vivacious themselves, the Grecians invested their deities with the same characteristics. They did not conceive of them as dwelling apart in passionless majesty, like Egyptian gods, with a solemn veil of obscurity around them. They were in the midst of things, working, fighting, loving, rivalling, and outwitting each other, just like human beings, from whom they differed mainly in more enlarged powers. No anchorites here preached torture of the body for the good of the soul. How to enjoy the pleasures of life with prudence, and invest it with the greatest degree of beauty, was their morality. In the procession of the nations, Greece always comes bounding before the imagination, like a graceful young man in the early freshness of his vigour; and nothing can wean a poetic mind from the powerful attraction of his immortal beauty.

Gay, imaginative, pliable, and free, the Grecians received religious ideas from every source, and wove them all together in a mythological web of fancy, confused and wavering in its patterns, but full of golden threads. They seem to have copied external rites from Egypt, without troubling themselves to comprehend the symbolical meaning, which priests concealed so carefully. They added ceremonies and legends from other countries, broken into fragments, and mixed together in strange disorder.

They had no Sacred Books, in the usual meaning of the term. Minos, their first lawgiver, was believed to have received his laws directly from Jupiter; and popular veneration invested with a certain degree of sacred authority the poems of Hesiod and Homer, supposed to have been written about nine hundred years before Christ. These works were believed to be divinely inspired by Apollo and the Muses. This was not a mere poetical figure of speech with the Grecians, as it would be with us; for they had a lively and undoubting faith that Apollo and the Muses were genuine deities, who took cognizance of the affairs of men, and filled the souls of prophets and poets with divine inspiration. It is said by some that

Hesiod was a priest in the temple of the Muses, on Mount Helicon. He seems to have been desirous to inculcate religious reverence, and a love of agriculture. He condemns licentiousness, irreverence to parents, and riches procured by fraud or violence. He strongly insists on the sacredness of an oath, and the laws of hospitality. He teaches to love those who love us, and to return gifts to the generous. He recommends withholding friendly offices from enemies; but declares that Jupiter will certainly punish those who refuse to pardon a suppliant offender. He gives a rather unintelligible account of the creation of the world from chaos. One of the most conspicuous agents in the work is Love, by which he probably meant the Principle of Attraction, drawing the elements into union, and producing a series of offspring; thus by the marriage of Heaven and Earth, Ocean was born. The deities, whom he describes as intermarrying, fighting, and plotting against each other, were the popular Gods of the country, the Spirits supposed to preside over planets and elements. He tells of huge giants called Titans, born of Heaven and Earth. One of them, named Chronos by the Greeks and Saturn by the Romans, dethroned his father Cœlus, or Heaven, and governed the universe. He is represented as devouring his own children; an allegorical way of saying that Time, whose Greek name is Chronos, destroys whatever he produces. One of his sons, named Jupiter, who escaped by artifice of his mother, expelled his father, and reigned in his stead. The Titans made war upon him, but he succeeded in chaining them all in the dungeons of Tartarus. These legends are supposed to be symbolical of the struggle of the elements when the world was formed.

Hesiod describes the administration of Saturn as the Golden Age of the world. Men lived like gods, without vices or passions, vexation or toil. In happy companionship with divine beings, they passed their days in tranquillity and joy, living together in perfect equality, united by mutual confidence and love. The earth was more beautiful than now, and spontaneously yielded an abundant