thing else, if you take the meaning of the word, than the study of wisdom. Now wisdom, as defined by the ancient philosophers, is the knowledge of divine and human things, and of the causes which contain these things; nor do I understand what he who censures this study would praise. For whether you seek the mind's entertainment, and its relief from anxieties, where is there any to be compared with that derived from studies which embrace the whole field of a virtuous and happy life? or whether you seek the grounds on which constancy and virtue rest, either this is the art whereby to obtain them, or there is none at all.” Philosophers, then, aspired to be theologians and moralists of nations, whose priests performed, indeed, what should have been religious rites, but had ceased to teach the doctrine which gave meaning to those rites. But as these philosophers recognised no standard, no common authority, each, according to the variety of human thought, pursued his own theories, selecting from his predecessors' opinions, changing or reversing them at his pleasure. Thus if we take only the three prevailing philosophic systems at Rome in Cicero's time, the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Academic, the whole field of morality, in the words of Horace, "Quid pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non," was completely broken up. It was a mass of endless variety and contradictions: so that as to the cardinal point of the end for which all other things are * to be sought, St. Augustine remarks that Varro could point out no less than two hundred and eighty-eight different opinions into which the three classes ramified, who placed this end in the mind, or in the body, or in both. As there was scarcely any opinion which could not claim some man of ability, not without a certain following, for its author, and as all opinions stood on the same foundation of mere reasoning from that common human nature which each interpreted differently, the result could only be, as it was, the destruction of all moral certainty in thinking minds, and the acquiescence of the vulgar in a practical system of religious rites, which carried with them no moral force or value, and in which man had no intelligent belief. But, secondly, the study of religion and morality being the proper study of philosophers, they had one and all lost that notion which is the keystone of the arch that supports both religion and morality, the notion of an immaterial and personal God. If, amid perpetual inconsistencies and contradictions, some at some time appear to set forth their belief in one God, the orderer and ruler of all things, yet their conception of such God would seem to be material or at least pantheistic. Thus Cicero makes Velleius, in the person of an Epicurean, expose, not without reason, the conflicting theories of no less than twenty-seven of the most De Civitate Dei, xix. 1. famous philosophers, comprising, in fact, every name of note from Thales to his own time, which he entitles not so much sober judgments as delirious dreams; which, however, seem all to agree in this, that they do not recognise a God at once immaterial and personal.* And being without the notion of a personal immaterial God, it is not wonderful that they should likewise have no grasp of the soul's enduring personality. The greater part believed it to perish at death; but those who deemed of it most highly, deemed it something of fiery, aerial, or etherial nature; or like the harmony of a musical instrument, or a portion of the universal world-soul, which after death was dissolved again into that from which it had sprung, as a flask filled with water in the sea when broken returns the severed portion to the surrounding element. The notion of immateriality, of spirit, was one which they did not conceive, either as concerns God or the human soul. But from this it followed likewise that they had lost the notion of sin, which is "any thing done, or said, or desired against the eternal law."§ This eternal * De Natura Deorum, i. 11-15. The philosophers whose delirious dreams on the subject of the Godhead are so noted are, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Alcmeo, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Democritus, Diogenes Apolloniates, Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Speusippus, Aristoteles, Xenocrates, Heracleitus, Theophrastus, Strato, Zeno, Aristo, Cleanthes, Persæus, Chrysippus, Diogenes Babylonius. † Döllinger, ut sup. p. 593. Champagny, iii. 335; Döllinger, p. 340. § S. Augustine, tom. viii. 378. G law is the divine reason. The goodness of the human act depends principally on its conformity to the eternal law, and by consequence its malice consists in being discordant from that law, that is, from the divine reason or will, which alone is the rule of its own act, as not being directed to any superior end.* But since in this great sea of ignorance the notion of a personal God had been lost, the notion of His reason or will, as the rule of government in the whole universe, which He had created, was gone with it.† Again; as to the nature of good and evil there prevailed the utmost uncertainty and contradiction. For the supreme good had become unknown to them; their horizon was limited to the visible world, and in the visible world evil was so mixed up with good, and to the mass of men indeed appeared to exercise so equal a contest with it, even if it did not gain the mastery, that they were inclined to attribute to it a coeternity with good, and to connect its origin with matter, not with a fault of the will. This error, which prevailed almost universally, indicated a confusion between the notion of moral and of physical evil. Or again, they identified evil with the imperfection or weakness of the faculty of knowledge, as Socrates maintained that all sin was ignorance. Of the will's freedom, or of its perversion, they had no clear view; none there *S: Thomas, Sum. 1, 2, 19, 4, and 21, 1, and 1, 63, 1. fore of the doctrine of human merit or demerit, as proceeding from the right or wrong use of the will. The perception of the divine personality being lost, the perception of the human personality was greatly weakened, and no philosopher could detach himself from a certain pantheistic leaning. In this state of things the notion of morality, of duty, which still remained, confused and as it were without an object, was but the stamp of the divine reason ineffaceably impressed on the human reason, the work of His hands. Thus the names of virtue and vice, of good and evil, still remained, while the existence of that Being to whom alone they had reference, had ceased to be an object of faith. Cicero, with all the books of Grecian wisdom before him, constructs an ethical system in which he makes as good as no use of his knowledge of the Godhead. Now Cicero, without being himself a philosopher, was yet perhaps "Rome's least mortal mind," and it was his purpose, after studying the whole field of Grecian thought, to present to his countrymen what he found most worthy of value. He was an eclectic, who, with a vast treasure-house at command, selects a picture here, a statue there, a rich mosaic, a costly table, an inlaid couch, the work of men long past away, for his own intellectual museum; and as he died in the last half century before the Christian period, his writings serve to show us what Grecian and Roman antiquity was as to |