such revelations; and that had but one such condescension, even to a harmless curiosity, been conceded, there would have arisen instantly a rent--a fracture--a schism--in another vast and collateral purpose of Providence. From all considerations of the Jewish condition at the era of Christianity, the fathers might have seen the license for doubt as to the notions of a diabolic inspiration. Why must the prompting spirits, if really assumed to be the efficient agency behind the Oracles, be figured as holding any relation at all to moral good or moral evil? Why not allow of demoniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power, prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes of man's moral nature? Or, if revolting angels were assumed, why degrade their agency in so vulgar and unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation to man which can be imputed to a demon--his function of secret _calumnious accusation_; from which idea, lowering the Miltonic "archangel ruined" into the assessor of thieves, as a private slanderer (_diabolos_), proceeds, through the intermediate Italian _diavolo_, our own grotesque vulgarism of the _devil_; [Footnote: But, says an unlearned man, Christ uses the word _devil_. Not so. The word used is _diabolos_. Translate v. g. "The accuser and his angels."] an idea which must ever be injurious, in common with all base conceptions, to a grand and spiritual religion. If the Oracles _were_ supported by mysterious agencies of spiritual beings, it was still open to have distinguished between mere modes of power or of intelligence, and modes of illimitable evil. The _results_ of the Oracles were beneficent: that was all which the fathers had any right to know: and their unwarranted introduction of wicked or rebel angels was as much a surreptitious fraud upon their audiences, as their neglect to distinguish between the conditions of an extinct superstition and a superstition dormant or decaying. To leave the fathers, and to state our own views on the final question argued by Van Dale--"What was the essential machinery by which the Oracles moved?"--we shall inquire, 1. What was the relation of the Oracles (and we would wish to be understood as speaking particularly of the Delphic Oracle) to the credulity of Greece? 2. What was the relation of that same Oracle to the absolute truth? 3. What was its relation to the public welfare of Greece?