The condition of Hopeful and Christian put by Giant Despair into "a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking to their spirits," and beaten with stripes, and made to feel that the bitterness of death was as nothing to the bitterness of life, illustrates in allegory the state of man for countless centuries. In darkness and in the shadow of death he lay helpless, singing like the prisoners vain hymns of hope, and praying vain prayers of patience, yet having all the while in his bosom, like Christian, a key called Promise, capable of unlocking the doors of his dungeon. Groping between what Sir Thomas Browne so finely calls "the night of our forebeing" and the unknown future--the dark before and after, he at last came to himself, and with the help of this key unlocked the mysteries of Nature, and found a way of physical salvation. Man's redemption of man is the great triumph of Greek thought. The tap-root of modern science sinks deep in Greek soil, the astounding fertility of which is one of the out-standing facts of history. As Sir Henry Maine says: "To one small people ... it was given to create the principle of progress. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of Nature nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." Though not always recognized, the controlling principles of our art, literature and philosophy, as well as those of science, are Hellenic. We still think in certain levels only with the help of Plato, and there is not a lecture room of this university[1] in which the trained ear may not catch echoes of the Lyceum. In his introductory chapter of his _Rise of the Greek Epic_, Professor Murray dwells on the keen desire of the Greeks to make life a better thing than it is, and to help in the service of man, a thought that pervades Greek life like an aroma. From Homer to Lucian there is one refrain--the pride in the body as a whole; and in the strong conviction that "our soul in its rose-mesh" is quite as much helped by flesh as flesh is by soul, the Greek sang his song "For pleasant is this flesh." The beautiful soul harmonizing with a beautiful body is as much the glorious ideal of Plato as it is the end of the education of Aristotle. What a splendid picture in Book III of the _Republic_, of the day when "our youth will dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason." The glory of this zeal for the enrichment of the present life was revealed to the Greeks as to no other people, but in respect to care for the body of the common man, we have only seen its fulfilment in our own day, but as a direct result of methods of research initiated by them.