LECTURE III.

HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED.

HAVING dwelt upon the principles which distinguished the great heathen world of nations before our Lord's coming from the principle which was the mother idea and the generating force of the society which He came to found, let us now pass from precept to example and from doctrine to life. Let us slightly review the former principles as they showed themselves in the conduct of men, and contrast them with the latter in the characters formed by it.

When we look over the five hundred years which elapsed from Solon to Christ, we are at first sight confused by the multiplicity and contradiction of religious and moral opinions and doctrines which arose in them. Of seeds so diverse it would seem that the harvest must be equally various. When, again, we look at the conduct and actions

of

men, how great in one respect is the divergence! Gather up, as far as human scrutiny can, and ponder on an individual human life as it lies before you in history, and then what a distance, for instance, between a Socrates and an Alcibiades, a Julius Cæsar and a Cato of Utica! Some would

seem to follow with more or less fidelity a moral rule before them and a moral law within them, resisting their passions with more or less success. Others with equal knowledge seem to discard obedience to any moral rule or law, and to give themselves up to the pursuit of whatever appears to them valuable or desirable without stint or limit. There is obviously room here for an unerring judgment to pronounce sentence of very different degrees.

But if we look beneath the surface of these rival philosophies and various systems of thought, and if we further endeavour to range these various lives under certain points common to them all, we shall find, I think, that of the whole mass of the Greek and Latin races during the five hundred years mentioned above, certain things are true in common, which are of no slight importance or inconsiderable bearing on the lives and actions of men. I will put them under six heads.

First, neither men in their conduct nor authors in their writings recognise one God, the Creator and Rewarder of men. And by this I do not mean that many philosophers did not seek to reduce the vulgar idolatry of the day to the notion of one God; but that, even if they did so, their god was a physical, not a personal God; not the Creator of men, but at the utmost the former of them out of pre-existent matter, coequal and coeval with the divine being or essence infused

through it; and further, not their Rewarder, but rather something which precluded the very notion of retribution, because it did away with a distinct existence, namely, the World-soul, into which after death their separate lives were sooner or later absorbed.

Secondly, none of them direct their actions in view to a future life. By which, again, I do not mean that the vision of a future life did not hover before the minds of many, and the possibility even of reward and punishment after death, but that these truths were no longer grasped with a hearty faith, nor asserted with unhesitating confidence. They were theories, which Plato might propound or Zeno deny, and Cato study the night before his suicide; but from a living belief they had become visions out of the ivory gate, which man, walking in the broad and palpable light of day, disregarded. Practically the thoughts and desires of men were limited to this present life and its objects.

Thirdly, the best and most virtuous, those who were looked upon as models in their day, proposed to themselves no higher standard than the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, within the sphere of the actual society in which they lived, that is, as limited to the course of this world.

Fourthly, they looked to no higher good than the good of the political life, as the end of these virtues. The human commonwealth's security and

well-being, progress in physical strength and wealth, in order, peace, and the enjoyments of life, was the object to be obtained. Those were the least selfish and the most virtuous who kept this end in view, rather than any private advancement of their own.

Fifthly, in practising these virtues, and in attaining this end, as their starting-point was human reason, the intellectual principle in man, so they looked to no other force to sustain them. They had lost the notion of any divine assistance given and infused into man in addition to his natural powers. And in saying this I am mindful of the Stoical notion of the demon or genius of each man. But this was a part of himself, the diviner part, by which he shared, as it were, a spark of that great fire which animated the universe.

Sixthly, the notion of sin, that is of disobedience to a law and a lawgiver superior to man and to the whole constitution of human society, but impressed upon man's inmost nature, eternal and unchangeable, was grievously impaired and almost extinct within them. There was substituted generally for it the notion of crime, that is, infringement of positive law enacted by man.

These then are six heads of that general resemblance which, in spite of their individual differences, the great men of Greek and Roman antiquity bore to each other. These constitute a certain level, out of which they do not rise, and

they make the choice of a representative man, in whom to consider that great world of human thought and action, of less importance than at first sight it might seem.

The character which perhaps first of all others presents itself for selection is that of Socrates. His name as a moral teacher, and the lustre of a death unequalled for sublimity in the whole range of heathen history, point him out at once. Yet are there great difficulties in his case. Not only is his period too remote for a review which closes four hundred years after his death, but the real Socrates is still a problem of history. We have him as depicted by two of his chief disciples, and it is hard to say in their portrait how much is artistic effect and how much the real man. I will not dwell upon the fact that popular reports of immorality rested on his fair fame from his own time downwards. Put it, if you like, that these were slanders so often tracking the footsteps of the great and good. But the plain old soldier, who is the less imaginative, and perhaps therefore more trustworthy, delineator of his character, does tell us things of him which make it hard to believe that he had any sense of moral purity at all. Those who study the position assigned to him by Xenophon in the visit which he volunteered to the hetæra Theodota, and that which he occupies in the same writer's Banquet, can only, I think, come to this conclusion. There are expressions abun