and receiving, and so to make the arts of life, our labour, and our faculties, the bonds of man's society with man."* Observe here the absence of man's relation to God. The writer does not seem to be aware that he is a creature, at the moment that he uses the very word 'creation' of the earth's products. Again, "the society and union of men will be best preserved, if kindness be shown to each person in proportion to the nearness of his connection with us. But we must seek higher the source of the natural principles of human community and society. For the first is that which is discerned in the society of the whole human race. Now of this the bond is reason and speech, which, by teaching, learning, communicating, discussing, and judging, draws men together, and joins them in a certain natural society. Nor are we in any thing further removed from the nature of brutes than in this. Of them we often say that they have courage, as horses and lions; never that they have justice, equity, or goodness, for they are devoid of reason and speech."† He then proceeds to mark the various degrees of relationship: after the degree of humanity itself, that of tribe, nation, language; closer still, that of the same city; and yet closer, the ties of blood. From marriage springs the family, which is the principle of the city, and the seed-plot of a commonwealth. No union surpasses that of good men in friendship. "But," he adds, "when you have

carefully surveyed all, no society is more effective or more affectionate than that which every one of us has with the commonwealth. Dear are our parents, dear our children, our relations, our friends; but our single country embraces all the tenderness we have for all. Where is the good man who would hesitate to die for it, if he could serve it?"* Thus human society and our country are viewed as ultimate facts, beyond which the writer does not go. That they themselves exist for any further end does not occur to him. That they are made up of persons who have a good of their own distinct from the good of the local or general society in which they are placed, is a truth which he does not come upon: not one which he discusses and rejects, but which lies out of his field of vision. In the whole of this first book, treating specially on the cardinal virtues, the only glimpse which I can find of any thing like personal religion, of any thing discerned in the individual man to be rior to society itself, is in one sentence of the last section. "There are some things so foul, and partly so criminal, that the wise man would not do them even to preserve his country." And a little further on he says, "In the community itself there are degrees of social duties, by which we may understand their order of precedency: first come those to the immortal gods; secondly, those to our country; thirdly, those to our parents; and

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so the rest." This is the only mention of the gods in the book. Of God, as one ruling, ordering, preserving power, there is none. Of man's responsibility to such a being not a vestige. For though these duties to the immortal gods are mentioned as the first in order, there is not a word said of what they consist in. This is the only reference to any beings above man in the book; and with these two words it stops. But there is a passage in the second book which, more than any other I have met with, expresses the infinite distance of Cicero's mind from any true conception of the Godhead. It is the following: "Of those things which concern the maintenance of human life, part are inanimate, as gold, silver, the productions of the earth, and the like; part are animals, which have their impulses and appetites. Of these, some are without reason; some make use of it. Those without reason are horses, oxen, other cattle, bees, by whose work any effect is produced for man's use and life. Of those who have the use of reason, two kinds are given; one of gods, the other of men. Piety and sanctity will propitiate the gods; but next, and after the gods, men can be most useful to men. There is the like division of things hurtful and profitable; but as they do not believe the gods to hurt, excepting these, they consider that men are of the greatest advantage or detriment to each other."* From this expression, that there are

* De Officiis, ii. 3.

two classes of beings who have the use of reason, gods and men, it would seem that, in Cicero's thought, the former were a sort of men endued with immortal life and superior strength.* With regard at least to those for whom his stereotyped phrase is "the immortal gods," he would seem to be at infinite distance from any notion of attributing to them creative power. Perhaps he may have a nobler view of what in Stoical language he so often calls "nature," or the mind of the universe: but then this power would appear to be material, and most certainly impersonal. And the phrase "using reason," applied to gods and men alike, would seem to convey the notion that they both, in different degrees, participated in a common faculty; shared, that is, were portions of this so-called mind of the universe.

Now we should certainly expect to find in a treatise of moral philosophy the creature's obligation to the Creator; and, in fact, St. Ambrose, writing on the same subject, notes this absence of a reference to a supreme Ruler and a future life; and points out how the Holy Scripture, on the contrary, placed eternal life in two things, the knowledge of the Godhead, and the fruit of good living; and refers to two psalms of David† as hav

* From Cicero's mode of quoting, it is often difficult to know whether what he says is his opinion, or that of others; here, I imagine, his own opinion agrees with that of the summa auctoritate philosophi" whom he is citing.

† Psalms xciii. 12, and exi. 1, 3, 5, 6.

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ing plainly insisted on this long before the times of the heathen philosophers.* However, as Cicero has written a treatise professedly on the Nature of the Gods, which too belongs to the same year of his life, let us see what light this throws upon his belief. And the first thing I should here remark is the total absence of any thing like reverence in the position which he takes himself in his treatment of such a subject. He assumes the character of an Academic of the later school, with whom there is no such thing as certainty, but only probability. And the way in which he illustrates this is to put in the mouth of Velleius, as an Epicurean, in the first book, a scornful statement of all the ridiculous diversities of belief which existed as to the nature of the gods. This serves as a prelude to introduce the atheism of the speaker, whose own tenets are answered by Cotta. In the next book Balbus is used as the expositor of Stoic doctrine. And here, indeed, there is a long, eloquent, and seemingly serious statement of the argument from design, as indicating the world to have been arranged by one ordering mind. "For who would call him a man who, after beholding the exact certitude of the heavenly motions, and the fixed order of the stars, and the connexion and adaptation of all these things with each other, should deny there to be any reason in these, and assert those things to hap

* S. Ambrose, De Officiis Ministrorum, ii. 2. A friend has pointed out to me that this treatise is the Christian counterpart to that of Cicero.