THK LIFK AND WORK OF HOlIEIi. 



53 



deification. Nor did he believe that the Greek cities on the 

 coasts of Asia Minor could properly be called colonies; he rather 

 inferred from the tenth chapter of Genesis that they were the 

 original settlements of the race. 



The Rev. J. J. B. Coles pointed out how great had been the 

 failure of ancient philosophies. Men had fallen into idolatry, the 

 worship of the heavenly bodies, of human ancestors, of the powers 

 of nature, and of abstract qualities. The Lecturer that afternoon 

 had shown them that to Homer the Greeks were indebted for the 

 foundations of their history, philosophy, science and religion. But 

 in the religion of the Greeks there was a deification of the human 

 passions. 



The Lecturer, in reply, said that he would take into careful 

 consideration the various criticisms and suggestions that had been 

 brought forward. As regards Joseph us, he had taken a great deal 

 of trouble in inquiring into his credibility, but he feared that the 

 result was not very satisfactory. In reply to Mr. Prickard's observa- 

 tion that Plutarch and other commentators did not seem to know of 

 the cryptograms, it occurred to him that such knowledge might be 

 handed down only by tradition, and therefore only be known to a 

 few persons at any time. These particular cryptograms might not 

 have been widely known because they did not answer the question 

 in which the Greeks were most interested ; that is to say, they did 

 not reveal which was the birthplace of Homer. He was acquainted 

 with cases in literature where an interpretation, which was not 

 indicated on the surface, had come to light by accident. Thus there 

 was a particular treatise among the Jews, often referred to, in which 

 a certain phrase had been objected to by the censors of Venice and 

 elsewhere, so that in some editions different words and capitals were 

 used in its place. One in particular consisted of letters normally 

 rendered "worshippers of stars and constellations." This would 

 seem absurd, because so few of those nations with whom the Jews 

 had to do at this period followed that particular kind of worship. 

 But he was once told that, as a matter of fact, what those initials 

 really meant was " worshippers of Christ and Mary." Yet he had 

 asked several people who had studied that treatise from childhood, 

 but had never heard of that interpretation. It was only here 

 and there that there was someone to whom the correct interpreta- 



