Pride, indeed, is not only the sin by which Lucifer falls in Christian angelography, but it peoples Tartarus also in heathen legends; and the boastful Salmoneus, whose insane ambition aspires to mimic the thunder of Jove, is always the first to be blasted by the bolt. Wherein then shall we say lies the difference--for a difference there certainly is--between the humility of the Christian and the σωφροσύνη of the Greek? The common root of the virtue in both is plain; it is the contrast between mortal and immortal, which belongs equally to Polytheism and to Monotheism; pride was not made for man; let him worship one God or many gods, he is a poor weak creature at the best, and only the more called upon to practise a sober-minded humility because his winged schemes so often end in creeping deeds. The luxuriant pride of our young leafage grows up so frequently into a shrivelled blossom and a hollow fruit. Yet there is a difference. In Monotheism there is an impassable gulf betwixt God and man which exists not in Polytheism. There are steps which lead up with not a few gradations from Pericles to Zeus; the son of a Theban Semele may be raised into a god, and the son of a god, like Hercules, may indulge grandly in many of the stout carnalities of a mortal man. Here therefore lies the primary ground of the more profound humility of the Christian. But there is another, which in practice has proved even more potent,--the intense {232} feeling of the Christian already noted with regard to the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Every Christian looks upon sin habitually as a healthy man looks upon the plague; in some popular catechisms it is even laid down that “every sin, even the smallest, deserves God’s wrath and curse both in this world and in that which is to come;” nay, more: certain theologians, deemed by some peculiarly orthodox, have taught that the whole world lies under a curse on account of the guilt of the great progenitor of the human race, in violating a special divine command, a guilt incurred some six thousand years ago, and transmitted in due course of generation to his hapless progeny. These dogmas, of course, are only strong caricatures of the great fact that every deed, whether good or evil, by the eternal constitution of things, necessarily transmits its influence from the earliest to the latest times; families and races therefore may lie for generations under a curse; the Greek tragedy acknowledges this in the strongest terms; but, as in the other cases that we have been considering, Christianity here not only intensifies a moral sentiment familiar to the heathen world, but it extends immensely the surface over which it is diffused. Æschylus and Sophocles could represent a heavy curse hanging for ages over the royal houses of Pelops and Labdacus as the consequence of monstrous sins committed by the founders of their families; but Christianity makes no selection in this matter, and flings the blackness of a moral blight in the most