HYMN OF EUPOLIS. 3 dismiss them. Our gleanings in this field must be very scanty. It would be idle to attempt to follow the efforts of the best thought of Heathendom after a just apprehension of the Divine, and its relations to the human. It is sufficient to say that the felt want of the most earnest minds, whether of Greece or of the further and more ancient India, was that of a Christ, a Redeemer. Whatever might be the case with the more extreme and more rigidly logical of Pantheists in the one country, or with the more insouciant of Epicurean speculators in the other, the average heart expressed itself in the invention of avataras and theophanies. Guided or not guided by the broken reflected lights of a revelation which their ancestors had forfeited, because they had not held it in honour, the masses wrote down a future incarnation as if past, and found their salvation in progressive manifestations of Vishnu, the Preserver, or in the benevolence of self-sacrificing or self-immolating heroes. But such fables had not pith enough to be received as dogmas by more subtle intellects. The Greek mind especially wearied itself in restless speculations. A moral despair walked abroad, to which the dying words of Aristotle may persuade us to believe that even he succumbed. But despair was not perfect till it became indifference. Above the din of the funeral games celebrated at the sepulchre in which the Sophists had entombed all noble aims, there rises the refreshing and the startling strain of Eupolis, a poet of the Socratic way of thinking, who outvied his fellows in the expression of a hope, common to his school, of the coming of a celestial instructor. It is a genuine Advent hymn; and it may be quoted not only as the single heathen contribution to our anthology, but also as exhibiting one of the very highest sentiments in the sphere of morals and religion, which the unbaptised Muse has "wedded to immortal verse." We use Charles Wesley's translation. And yet a greater hero far (Unless great Socrates could err), O Father, King, whose heavenly face We thy magnificence adore, And thy well-known aid implore ; Nor vainly for thy help we call ; The Advent of the Messiah was a glowing theme for the numbers of prophets and poets, and for the piety of saints of the Jewish dispensation; and not the less glowing or sublime on account of the indeterminateness attaching to many of the predictions and expectations of its nature. The paradoxes, which doubtless served at once to attract and to baffle inquiry in some directions, are to us so fully MATERIALS FOR ADVENT LITERATURE. 5 cleared up by events, that it is not necessary to dwell upon them longer than may suffice to indicate what a mysterious wealth of picturesque and pathetic metaphor the hopes of the Hebrew bards and people have stored up for the poetical commemoration of an Advent which has now to so many Christian generations been a glorious and accomplished fact. The theme is one from the associations of which is wanting no single element of grandeur, sublimity, majesty, tenderness, love, pity, and pathos. All the circumstances recorded, with an ever-increasing particularity of detail, as about to happen, and which were to authenticate and identify the Messiah, comprise the materials for Advent literature which Christian poets inherit, and which up to the present moment they combine and recombine with an exhaustless variety. And to these the evangelical narratives have contributed other materials—the graphic circumstances of the life and death of Christ, and the hopes and fears which gather about His second coming to judge the quick and the dead. The King of Glory was to walk wearily along the highways of the world; the everlasting Son of the Father was to be born of a Virgin; the Infinite was to be brought visibly down to the conditions of space; the Eternal was to be subject to seasons and successions; the Word, the Wisdom of God, was to be incarnate in the form of man, and in that form to become the slighted of His own people, and the foolishness of the Greek. Poverty and hardship were to dog His footsteps through His short and sorrowful. life; scorn, and dejection, and affliction were to be His beyond the wont of the sons of men; the sceptre of His everlasting kingdom was to be a reed; His crown was to be of thorns; in the place of receiving the anointing oil, He was to be spit upon by ruffianly soldiers; His throne was to be the base exaltation of a cross; and His last moments were to be eclipsed with the felt darkness of His Father's withdrawal. Over against these things were to be placed the visible, audible recognitions from heaven, and especially the glory of His ascension, which faintly imaged the manner of that second coming, in which He is to revisit earth with all the mercy and terror of a Judge. In such a picture the lights of heaven fall athwart the stolid blackness of the pit. Such a poem would out-tax the powers of collective angelic genius. Yet it is about such events that Advent poetry has to be conversant. They are gravely, simply, and therefore grandly epitomised in a few sentences of the Te Deum. The hymns of Ambrose, to whom with St. Augustine, the authorship of the Te Deum has been referred by a wellknown legend, like most of the earlier hymns of the Church, were chiefly objective, and had to do with the seasons of the Christian year, and the horary or the more capital divisions of the day. One of the most celebrated is that on the Advent, beginning "Veni, Redemptor gentium." We pass this by to offer another which appertains to the group of hymns called Ambrosian. In his admirable repertory, the "Thesaurus Hymnologicus," Daniel, whilst entering a caveat against its reception as an Advent hymn, records the fact that it is generally and even authoritatively appropriated to that season as 66 Hymnus in Adventu Domini ad Vesperas," under which heading it is inserted by Bässler in his Auswahl Altchristlicher Lieder." Daniel gives two versions, the older one being identical with that offered by Bässler, and the newer one being that which is found in the Roman breviary. A translation—which we subjoin— of this later and rather shorter version, occurs in Mr. Orby Shipley's "Lyra Messianica," to which it is contributed by a certain or uncertain W. J. C. The original hymn commences "Conditor alme siderum," and is rendered by W. J. C. into the vernacular, as follows : Creator of the starry height, Of hearts believing endless Light, POETRY OF DEPRECATION. Who, lest the earth, through evil eye The poetry of the Second Advent before the time of the Reformation seems to have been mainly devoted to the setting forth of the terrors of the Judge and of the Judgment. The minds of the writers seem to have been fascinated by those divine qualities which, taken alone, are the least favourable to the present comfort and the eternal happiness of a sinful creature. Wrath was anxiously deprecated. Hope seemed at times to be overshadowed by the gloom of a scarcely contingent personal interest in a general condemnation. Of course this tendency does not manifest itself uniformly; but it is to be detected, less or more, in the line of poems that, from Ephraim Syrus and Theodore of the Studium to Thomas de Celano and our own Richard de Hampole, treated exclusively or incidentally of the subject of the Second Coming to Judgment. This class of hymns of the Second Advent we find it convenient to represent by an ode of St. Theodore of the Studium, rather than by such better known ones as the "Dies Ira" of Thomas de Celano. Theodore was Hegumen of the great Abbey of the Studium, at Constantinople; and suffered scourging, imprisonment, and exile during the Iconoclastic persecution under Leo the Armenian. He died in banish |