dantly scattered through the Dialogues of Plato which tend to the same point. It is for all these reasons therefore, of time, of uncertainty as to the real man and what he taught, and of the dubious moral light in which he stands in the works of his own disciples, that I pass him over.

Now, passing to the generation immediately preceding our Lord, we find a school at Rome which laid especial claim to the possession of a virtue equal to all the emergencies of life. And in that very school we find a noble Roman, inheritor of a great name, who may be considered the most faithful representative of old Roman political traditions, as well as of the higher morality which the corruption of universal empire had so grievously impaired: a senator who in evil times was a worthy specimen of what the Senate had been when that body was the greatest tribunal of justice in the world, the most devoted to the good of the state which it governed. Cato of Utica's life, as it lies for us sketched in Plutarch, may be considered the model of a life grounded on the dictates of natural reason. Of dauntless courage, and of no mean capacity in the field, in his civil life he is inflexibly incorrupt. A devoted brother, kind and considerate towards all with whom he is brought into relation, that is, being citizens and equals; for of his conduct to slaves, the blow given to one on the night of his death, so severe that it caused an inflammation of his

hand, impairing the force with which he dealt his own death-stroke, does not give a pleasant impression. In the whole course of his life he has before him the good of his country as a constraining motive. Once he seems to rise above even this, where he censures Cæsar's attack upon the Germans on grounds of universal justice, telling the Senate that they ought to deliver Cæsar into the hands of those who had been thus unjustly assaulted, that they might expiate the offence, and not bring a curse upon the city. There are but two blots in all this life recorded. The one, that this generally high-minded senator, while he prosecuted Muræna for obtaining the consulship by corrupt means, let off the other candidate Silanus, who was equally guilty, but was his brother-in-law; the other that he made use of the unlimited right of divorce possessed by the Romans of his time to repudiate his wife Marcia, in order to gratify his friend Hortensius, who had fallen in love with her, though after his death, when she was a rich widow, he took her back again. With these exceptions, perhaps, it may be said that whatever Roman virtue could do, Cato of Utica, up to the time of his death, had done. Why, then, not take him for a representation of heathen man? In this I am influenced by two reasons: first, that his writings having perished, we have no means of fully judging his principles from his own mouth; secondly,

* Plutarch's Life of Cato of Utica. See also Merivale, i. 453.

that the mode of his death undoes much of his life's grandeur, and sets him lower than many others apparently greatly inferior to him in their personal character and in the conduct of their domestic and civil life. For consider what his suicide meant. Agonized at the issue of the civil war, he had exclaimed, "How dark and uncertain is the will of heaven! Pompey when he did nothing wisely or honestly was always successful, and now that he would preserve his country and defend her liberty he is altogether unfortunate."* But the mode of death which he selected was an act in accordance indeed with the Stoical doctrine carried out by Zeno and Cleanthes, approved afterwards by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, of "the open door," but in itself the definitive rejection of a belief in a providence over the affairs of men. It was a practical admission that man had no inward. freedom of the will which tyranny could not reach; a practical assertion, moreover, that so far from being a creature placed by God in a certain post which he was not to desert-an image repeatedly used by the better heathen-he was his own master, an independent being, who had nothing to live for if he were deprived of political liberty. Cicero, so often timid in action, so often a moral coward, redeemed in his death much that was wanting in his life, and when he stretched his neck out of his litter to meet without swerving the blow of

*Plutarch's Cato of Utica.

Antony's assassin, is far more human, more religious, and more noble than Cato, who ponders during the night over the immortality of the soul, and kills himself in the morning because he cannot stoop to meet the wrath or the clemency of Cæsar, his equal once, now the lord of his oncefree country, and the disposer of his own lot.

This same Stoical school presents us at a later period two persons, one remarkable as a master of thought, one as uniting thought with action in a sphere the most exalted and most difficult, the government of the Roman empire at the period of its greatest extension,-Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius; the former a philosopher of no mean name, whose conduct seems to have been consistent with his theory; the latter a ruler who, with his adopted father and predecessor, stands at the very head of all heathen sovereigns. Why not take one of these as a specimen of what heathenism could do? I reply, as to Epictetus, that he left nothing in writing; and we only know him by the remains gathered up by disciples, which are, however, sufficient to convey accurately his philosophical system, while at the same time his life is very obscure, the particulars of it little known and the chief events uncertain. But many might think Marcus Aurelius, as combining both thought and action, as ruling for nearly twenty years with absolute power, yet with general justice, clemency, fortitude, and vigour, the greatest of empires, to

be the very person in whom heathen virtue culminated. Nevertheless, I think an examination of those private thoughts called his Meditationsperhaps the most interesting book which heathen literature has left to us, because it discloses the secret recesses of a heathen soul-would show that such a choice would not be the best that could be made. In truth, there are the same objections at the bottom to Marcus Aurelius and to Epictetus. Their religious system is a complete materialism. It recognises only two principles, Matter, and an active Force eternally indwelling in matter and forming it. It knows of no incorporeal things, save as our own abstractions. God is the unity of a Force embracing the whole universe, penetrating all things, assuming all forms, and as such, a subtle Fluid, Fire, Æther, or Spirit, under which the Stoics understood a fifth element, to which the air served as a material basis. In this ætherial fiery force all modes of existence of the World-body animated by it are contained beforehand, and develop themselves regularly out of it: it lives and moves itself in every thing, is the common source of all life and all desire. Now as in this system God and necessity are one, every thing ethical becomes physical. The soul of man is of like substance, and so is a breath or fire like the World-soul, of which it is a portion; but it manifests itself in man at the same time as the Force from which Knowledge and Action proceed, as Intelligence, Will, and Self-consci