15S 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



Oranje-Staat and the Transvaal, which are des- 

 tined to form the connecting link in the chain of 

 posts yet to be established from Cairo and Khar- 

 toom down to the extremity of Southern Africa. 

 The Netherlands committee has been constituted 

 under Prince Henry of the Low Countries. The 

 Austrian committee has for its president Baron 

 von Hofmann, Minister of Finance, under the 

 patronage of the prince imperial, the Archduke 

 Rudolf. The Italian committee is in process of 

 formation, under the presidency of the heir-ap- 

 parent. The French committee is being formed 

 under the direction of the Admiral La Ronciere 

 Le Noury, the Paris Society of Geography coop- 

 erating. 



A Society for the Exploration of Africa has 

 been founded at Madrid, under the presidency 

 of the King of Spain, in conformity with the 

 programme of the Brussels Congress. Judge 

 Daly is engaged in forming a national committee 

 in the United States ; and M. Bouthillier de Beau- 

 mont, President of the Geographical Society of 

 Geneva, has announced that a committee will be 

 formed in Switzerland. Finally, the King of 

 Sweden, the King of Saxony, the Grand-duke of 

 Baden, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, the Grand-duke 

 Constantine of Russia, the Crown-Prince of Den- 

 mark, and the Archduke Carl Ludvvig of Austria, 

 have accepted the title of honorary members of 

 the international committee. Thus have the sov- 

 ereign houses of Europe given at least the sup- 

 port of their names to the work, and even the 

 Sultan of Zanguebar has written to the Kino; of the 



Belgians to the effect that his cooperation might 

 be counted on. 



It is to be wished that every nation in Europe 

 may enter heart and soul into this holy crusade 

 of civilization against barbarism and the trade in 

 human beings, at the very moment when the 

 rivalries of the respective governments threaten 

 momentarily to place them at enmity with each 

 other in spite of themselves, and though they de- 

 sire only to labor in peace. At the Brussels Con- 

 gress the representatives of the various nations 

 extended the hand to one another, forgetting all 

 animosity and every old grievance, and devoting 

 themselves to labor in common for a noble object. 

 Would it not be an admirable confirmation of the 

 great principle of human brotherhood if, in the 

 clash of arms and amid the preparations for war, 

 there were to spring up and develop an interna- 

 tional association appealing to the kindly feelings 

 of the people of our continent for the means of 

 bestowing on the wretched inhabitants of a neigh- 

 boring continent order, security, and liberty — of 

 suppressing the slave-trade, and of introducing 

 among them the blessings of modern civilization ? 

 Would it not also be the most telling and, at the 

 same time, the most honorable protest against 

 that policy of mutual jealousy and distrust whose 

 upshot must be to join in a general melee nations 

 that ought to have but one aim — namely, to dif- 

 fuse throughout the whole world the principles 

 of justice revealed by Christianity for the enfran- 

 chisement and happiness of all mankind ? — Revue 

 des Deux Mondcs. 





THE CONTEST OF HEATHENISM WITH CHRISTIANITY, AS 

 REFLECTED IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE. 



By Prof. E. ZELLER, of Berlin. 



THE great preacher of Christianity to the 

 heathen, the Apostle Paul, calls his 

 preaching of " Christ crucified, unto the Jews 

 a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolish- 

 ness;" 1 and thereby gives a concise and striking 

 definition of the point of view from which the 

 opposition of the two sections of the non-Chris- 

 tian world, whom he had gone forth to gain, 

 chiefly proceeded. To the Jew, Christianity, 

 even when hostile to him, was to a certain ex- 

 tent intelligible, for it was rooted in monotheism 

 and in the Messianic hopes of his nation But 

 the heathen, or, as Paul calls them, the Greeks, 

 1 1 Corinthians 1. 23. 



were absolutely without the assumptions with 

 which it found points of contact in the Jewish 

 world. Its monotheism placed it in undisguised 

 enmity to the polytheistic national religion ; and, 

 on the other hand, to those who might have 

 been disposed to adopt monotheism as such, the 

 doctrines which had grown out of the Jewish 

 belief in the Messiah must have been all the 

 more unintelligible. The worship of a Jew who 

 had suffered the disgraceful death of male- 

 factor ; the belief that he still Jived in heaven ; 

 faith in his divine origin and nature ; the ex- 

 pectation that he would come again with the 

 hosts of heaven to put an end to the existing 



