in human life; and the names connected with its origin—­once human names upon the earth—­will pass upon the stars, so that the nomina shall have changed to numina, and be taken upon the lips with religious awe.  So it was with these old festivals,—­so with all the representations of human life in stone or upon the canvas, in the fairy-tale, the romance, and the poem; at every successive repetition, at every fresh resurrection, is evolved by human faith and sympathy a deeper significance, until they become the centres of national thought and feeling, and men believe in them as in revelations from heaven; and even the oracles themselves, in respect of their inherent meaning, as also of their origin and authority, rise by the same ascending series of repeated birth,—­like that at Delphi, which, at first attributed to the Earth, then to Themis, daughter of Earth and Heaven, was at last connected with the Sun and constituted one of the richest gems in Apollo’s diadem of light.

In the end we shall find that the whole world organizes about its centre of Faith.  Thus, under three different religious systems, Jerusalem, Delphi, and Mecca were held to be each in its turn the omphalos or navel of the world.  It follows inevitably that the main movement of the world must always be joyous and hopeful.  By reason of this joy it is that every religious system has its feast; and the sixth day—­the day of Iacchus—­is the great day of the festival.  The inscription which rises above every other is “To the Saviour Gods.”

We must look at history as a succession of triumphs from the beginning; and each trophy that is erected outdoes in its magnificence all that were ever erected before it.  Nothing has suffered defeat, except as it has run counter to the main movement of conquest.  No system of faith, therefore, can by any possibility pass away.  Involved it may be in some fuller system; its material bases may be modified; its central source become more central in the human heart, and so stronger in the world and more immediate in its connection with the eternal; but the life itself of the system must live forever and grow forever.

Still it is true that in the widest growth there is the largest liability to weakness.  “Thus it is,” says Fouque, “with poor, though richly endowed man.  All lies within his power so long as action is at rest within him; nothing is in his power the moment action has displayed itself, even by the lifting-up of a finger on the immeasurable world.”  In the very extent of the empire of an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Tamerlane, rests the possibility of its rapid dissolution.  At the giddiest altitude of triumph it is that the brain grows dizziest and there is revealed the deepest chasm of possible defeat; and the conqueror,

  “Having his ear full of his airy fame,”