A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
An instinct inherited from the habits of many generations teaches our social fellow-creatures to entrust the welfare of their communities to the protection of an experienced leader. Birds that become gregarious only at a certain time of the year select a guide for that special occasion. Others have a permanent leader, and among the more intelligent quadrupeds that leadership becomes dual. Besides the stout champion who comes to the front in moments of danger, wild cattle, horses, antelopes, deer, and the social quadrumana have a veteran pioneer who guides their migrations and sentinels their encampments.
Among the primitive tribes of our fellow-men, too, the authority of leadership is divided between a warrior and a teacher, a chieftain and a priest. The obstinacy of savages, who refuse to yield to reason, suggested the plan of controlling their passions by the fear of the unseen, but ghost-mongery was not the only, nor even the most essential, function of primitive priesthood. The elders of the Brahmans were the guardians of homeless children and overseers of public charities. The Celtic Druids were the custodians of national treasures. The rune-wardens of the ancient Scandinavians preserved the historical traditions and law records of their nation. The priests of the Phœnicians (like our Indian medicine men) were trained physicians. The Egyptian [[232]]hierophants were priests of knowledge, as well as of mythology. They were the historians and biographers of their nation. They codified the national laws. They taught geometry; they taught grammar; they taught and practiced surgery; they devoted a large portion of their time to astronomical observations. Their temple-cities were, in fact, free universities, and the waste of time devoted to the rites of superstition was more than compensated by secular studies, and to some degree also by the political services of learned priests, who seem to have been occasionally employed in diplomatic emergencies.
Motives of political prudence induced the law-givers of the Mediterranean nations to circumscribe the authority of their pontiffs, which at last was, indeed, almost limited to the supervision of religious ceremonies. But in Rome, as well as in Greece and the Grecian colonies of western Asia, the true functions of priesthood were assumed by the popular exponents of philosophy, especially by the Stoics and Pythagoreans. The weekly lectures of Zeno were attended by a miscellaneous throng of truth-seekers; the disciples of Pythagoras almost worshiped their master; Diagoras and Carneades traveled from town to town, preaching to vast audiences of spell-bound admirers; Apollonius of Tyana rose in fame till cities competed for the honor of his visits; the clientèle of no Grecian prince was thought complete without a court philosopher; the tyrant Dionysius, in all the pride of his power, invited the moral rigorist Plato and submitted to his daily repeated reproofs. Philosophers [[233]]were the confessors, the comforters, and the counselors of their patrons, and philosophic tutors were in such request that wealthy Romans did not hesitate to procure them from the traffickers in Grecian captives and indulge them in all privileges but that of liberty. Centuries before a bishop of Rome contrived to avert the wrath of King Alaric, doomed cities had been spared at the intercession of pagan philosophers, and philosophers more than once succeeded in allaying the fury of mutineers who would have ridiculed an appeal to mythological traditions.