The period embraced in the Third Book is about 2500 years, from the supposed epoch of Zoroaster (3000 B.C.) to that of Buddha (541 B.C.).

The Fourth Book treats of the instinct of God among the Greeks and Romans, “from the singer of the Iliad (900 B.C.) down to the Baruch of the Roman world, the prophet of the downfall of the Aryan Ante-Christian civilization,—­Tacitus.”  This God-consciousness is found first in the Grecian feeling of the Commonwealth,—­the idea of a common good surpassing a personal good; then in the conception of the Epic, which assumes a political as well as a physical Kosmos, or order; then in the grand moral ideas lying at the basis of the Mythology,—­the myths, for instance, of Prometheus, and the picture of Nemesis and the Fates.  Next, the deep sense of God speaks out in Grecian Tragedy and the great works of Grecian Art; and in the highest degree, in the Philosophy which culminated in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

The Roman expression of these profound instincts is placed by Bunsen far below the Grecian.  It is manifested especially in their idea of Law, and even in the doubts and despair of their leading thinkers in the time of the Emperors.

The closing portion of the volume terminates the history of the progress of the idea of God before Christianity, among the Aryan races, by a description of the religious instincts of the Teutonic tribes.  In their respect for woman and for marriage, in their political commonwealths, in their worship of one God, and their belief in a moral Kosmos, Bunsen beholds the expression of the Divine idea within them, preparing for the more full development which is to come through the ideas and spirit of Christianity.  The book closes fitly with the grand prophecy of the Voeluspa in the Scandinavian Edda.

We regret that want of space should prevent us from giving extracts from this most eloquent and philosophic work.  Its glory is, that, breaking through the formulae of creeds and the external signs of religious faith, it has the courage to listen to the voice of God all along the devious course of human history,—­hearing that mysterious tone, not alone in the chants of the Hebrews or the confessions of the Christians, but in every smallest utterance of truth, every syllable of unselfish patriotism, every groan of offended conscience, every myth springing from the moral sense, every song, every speech which would exalt the True, the Beautiful, and the Good over the selfish and false and base.  In Bunsen’s philosophy, these, even more than all outward confession and ceremonial, are the true expression of the workings of the Divine Spirit in Human History.

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