lost in despair at an all-encircling mystery.  Not so the Greek Childe Roland who set the slug-horn to his lips and blew a challenge.  Neither Shakespeare nor Browning tells us what happened, and the old legend, Childe Roland, is the incarnation of the Greek spirit, the young, light-hearted master of the modern world, at whose trumpet blast the dark towers of ignorance, superstition and deceit have vanished into thin air, as the baseless fabric of a dream.  Not that the jeering phantoms have flown!  They still beset, in varied form, the path of each generation; but the Achaian Childe Roland gave to man self-confidence, and taught him the lesson that nature’s mysteries, to be solved, must be challenged.  On a portal of one of the temples of Isis in Egypt was carved:  “I am whatever hath been, is, or ever will be, and my veil no man has yet lifted.”

The veil of nature the Greek lifted and herein lies his value to us.  What of this Genius?  How did it arise among the peoples of the AEgean Sea?  Those who wish to know the rock whence science was hewn may read the story told in vivid language by Professor Gomperz in his “Greek Thinkers,” the fourth volume of which has recently been published (Murray, 1912; Scribner, 1912).  In 1912, there was published a book by one of the younger Oxford teachers, “The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us,"(1) from which those who shrink from the serious study of Gomperz’ four volumes may learn something of the spirit of Greece.  Let me quote a few lines from his introduction: 

     (1) By R. W. Livingstone, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1912 (2d
     ed., revised, 1915).

“Europe has nearly four million square miles; Lancashire has 1,700; Attica has 700.  Yet this tiny country has given us an art which we, with it and all that the world has done since it for our models, have equalled perhaps, but not surpassed.  It has given us the staple of our vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge.  Politics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history—­these are all Greek words.  It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our higher education.  It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even on minds alien or hostile.  Rome took her culture thence.  Young Romans completed their education in the Greek schools....  And so it was with natures less akin to Greece than the Roman.  St. Paul, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, who called the wisdom of the Greeks foolishness, was drawn to their Areopagus, and found himself accommodating his gospel to the style, and quoting verses from the poets of this alien race.  After him, the Church, which was born to protest against Hellenism, translated its dogmas into the language of Greek thought and finally crystallized them in the philosophy of Aristotle.”