Whilst we were at supper, Apollo played on the harp, Silenus danced a cordax, and the Muses repeated Hesiod's Theogony, and the first Ode of Pindar.

Belief in supreme deity underlies all the Eastern theogonies, which belief, however, was soon perverted or lost sight of.

But the Orientals had theogonies, not philosophies.

If Homer did not create the Grecian theogony, he gave form and fascination to it.

Among all the ancient nations, however complicated were their theogonies, and however degraded the forms of worship assumed,of men, or animals, or plants,it was heat or light (the sun as the visible promoter of blessings) which was regarded as the animus mundi, to be worshipped as the highest manifestation of divine power and goodness.

Perhaps his greatest work was the amusement of his leisure hours for thirteen years,a philosophical treatise called "The City of God," in which he raises and replies to all the great questions of his day; a sort of Christian poem upon our origin and end, and a final answer to Pagan theogonies,a final sentence on all the gods of antiquity.

Moreover, he made new and extraordinary "revelations,"that he had ascended into the seventh heaven and held converse with Gabriel; and he now added to his creed that old lie of Eastern theogonies, that base element of all false religions,that man can propitiate the Deity by works of supererogation; that man can purchase by ascetic labors and sacrifices his future salvation.

This is not discrepant with the oldest traditions and theogonies of the East,the hidden wisdom of ancient Indian and Persian and Egyptian sages, concealed from the vulgar, but really embraced by the profoundest men, before corruptions perverted even their wisdom.

" This notion of the superior virtue of virginity was one of the fruits of those Eastern theogonies which were engrafted on the early Church, growing out of the Oriental idea of the inalienable evil of matter.

It has been modified by Brahminical, Buddhistic, and Persian theogonies, and extended to Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor.

All this was based on penance,self-expiation,which entered so largely into the theogonies of the East, and which gave a gloomy form to the piety of the Middle Ages.

It is not a little remarkable that the earliest cause of the Crusades, so far as I am able to trace, was the adoption by the European nations of some of the principles of Eastern theogonies which pertained to self-expiation.

Hesiod, Theogony, v. 87.

He had for some years past been engaged in the task of writing a stupendous work on Pre-Zoroastrian Theogonies, in which, it is to be supposed, Ul-Jabal acted somewhat in the capacity of secretary.

Lamb refers first to the passage from Hesiod's Theogony, and then to his Works and Days (which Chapman translated)"Dispensation of Providence to the Just and Unjust.

[English translation by George Eliot, 1854]; Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 1843; The Essence of Religion, 1845; Theogony, 1857; God, Freedom, and Immortality, 1866.

As the serene air that ever surrounds the head of Mont Blanc excels in purity the mists of the fen, so does the lofty theism of the Mosaic account rise high above the nature-worship of the Egyptian and Hesiodean theogonies.

It turns out, however, that they were only second cousins; or so at least we interpret the following precious piece of theogony.

I threatened him with a revolver, and swore indignantly by all the evil spirits in the Korak theogony, that if he upset me in that way again I would kill him without benefit of clergy, and carry mourning and lamentation to the houses of all his relatives.

Thus understood, she was associated with the theogonies of the Far East.

Theogony Adapa and the Southwind Revolt of Tiamat Penitential Psalms Descent to the Underworld Inscription of Sennacherib The Flood Invocation to the Goddess Beltis The Eagle and the Snake Oracles of Ishtar of Arbela The Flight of Etana

[Illustration: Signature] I. THEOGONY

' Also, a similar reference to Aphrodite in Hesiod, 'Theogony', vv.