to be sure, that with this aspect three-fourths of human life is concerned. But there are other aspects which may be set in view. 'Frail and striving mortality,' says the elder Pliny in a noble passage, 'mindful of its own weakness, has distinguished these aspects severally, so as for each man to be able to attach himself to the divine by this or that part, according as he has most need.[1] That is an apology for polytheism, as answering to man's many-sidedness. But Israel felt that being thus many-sided degenerated into an imaginative play, and bewildered what Israel recognised as our sole religious consciousness,—the consciousness of right. 'Let thine eyelids look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee; turn not to the right hand nor to the left; remove thy foot from evil!'[2]
For does not Ovid say,[3] in excuse for the immorality of his verses, that the sight and mention of the gods them selves,—the rulers of human life,—often raised immoral thoughts? And so the sight and mention of all aspects of the not ourselves must. Yet how tempting are many of these aspects! Even at this time of day, the grave authorities of the University of Cambridge are so struck by one of them, that of pleasure, life and fecundity,—of the hominum divomque voluptas, alma Venus,—that they set it publicly up as an object for their scholars to fix their minds upon, and to compose verses in honour of. That is all very well at present; but with this natural bent in the authorities of the University of Cambridge, and in the Indo-European race to
- ↑ Fragilis et laboriosa mortalitas in partes ista digessit, infirmitatis suæ memor, ut portionibus coleret quisque, quo maxima indigeret. Nat. Hist., ii, 5.
- ↑ Prov., iv, 25, 27.
- ↑ Tristia, ii. 287:—
Quis locus est templis augustior ? hoec quoque vitet,
In culpam si qua est ingeniosa suam.See the whole passage.
