guide of life, the standard of virtue, the path to happiness." If any one can find reasons of morality or of piety, motives to virtue, or sources of joy in this school, he must excel the ingenious Ovid himself, who had to amend it in one or two points to suit the licentiousness of his own poetry. If not elegantly, he is correctly, translated in the following lines, taken from his 15th book : "Oh! you whom horrors of cold death affright, We shall now hear the second school-the Italic. Pythagoras himself, the great Grecian father of the Metempsichosis, and his distinguished pupil, the Locrian Timæus, have opened the mysteries of this line in their leading differential attributes. This school believed in souls, and taught their immortality too. But curious souls they were, and unenviable their immortality. "The soul of the world," said they, "is an immortal soul, and human souls are but emanations from it-to which, after some ages of transmigrations, they return and are reabsorbed." This is a miniature of the darling peculiarity of Pythagoreanism. These emanation souls were, by an insuperable necessity, to make the tour of some definite number of human bodies, clean and unclean; and on their return to the anima mundi, to lose their individuality and identity, and to be amal- There yet remains another school gamated with it. This soul of the the Ionic school-more ancient, world, moreover, was by the god Ne- and therefore more orthodox, than cessity compelled to change worlds. either of the former two. Thales, Hence a succession of new worlds and its founder, was followed by Anaxiof new transmigrations of the soul of mander and Anaximenes: these were the world was to fill up the series of followed by Anaxagoras, the instrucinfinite ages. This was illustrated tor of Pericles and Archelaus, the by a bottle of sea-water, well corked, alleged master of Socrates. These tossing about in the tumults of the all, down to Socrates, devoted themocean until the cork decayed, or till selves to physics, and not to morals; the bottle dashed upon a rock. In therefore they are out of our premises. either event, its soul, or contents Not so Socrates: of him Cicero has within, mingled with the water of the said, "He was the first to call philoocean, and so lost its identity; yet it sophy from the heavens, to place it in was as immortal as the ocean, because cities, and to introduce it into private a part of it. If the illustration was houses; that is, to teach public and good, the proof was better. This private morals." He was, indeed, learned lawgiver and philosopher, the first and the last of all the Grecian blessed with a retentive memory, philosophers that wholly devoted was able to prove his doctrine by himself to morals. narrating his own various and numerous transmigrations, antecedent to the name and body of Pythagoras. His delighted followers heard his curious and brilliant intrigues and singular freaks while his soul was tabernacling in other mortal tenements. Plato and Xenophon were his immediate pupils; Aristotle and Xenocrates theirs. The Ionic school, in its theological and moral departments, was now merged in the Socratic; but that soon branched off into several sects the Platonic, or old Academic; the Aristotelian, or Peripatetic; the Stoic, founded by Zeno; the middle Academy, by Arcesailaus; and the new Academy, by Carneades. Between these two last Academies there was no real or permanent difference. If not in all their conclusions, they were, in all their modes of reasoning, sceptical. Their discriminating principles were, that "nothing could be known," and that "every thing was to be disputed," consequently nothing was to be assented to, said the absolute sceptic. "No," said the Academies; the probable, wherever you find it, must be assented to; but, till it be found, you are to doubt." And the misfortune was, they rarely or ever found the probable; and in effect the Academies and followers of Pyrrho, the absolute sceptic, were equally Atheists all their lives. Meanwhile, as said the learned Bishop of Gloucester, "they talk perpetually of their verisimile and of their probabile, amidst a situation of absolute doubt, darkness, and scepticism-like Sancho Pancha of his island on the terra firma!" Pyrrho dogmatically affirmed that "no one opinion was more probable than another," and that there were no moral qualities or distinctions. Beauty and deformity, virtue and vice, happiness and misery, had no real cause, but depended on comparison-in one word, that "all was relative." The lights of all Pagan philosophy are now reduced to the three sects of the Socratic school-the Platonic, the Peripatetic, and the Stoic. If we find no surer, no clearer moral lights in these three, all Grecian, all Roman philosophy is a varied and extended system of scepticism, so far as the origin, moral obligations, and destiny of man are involved. The Stoic, (for we shall take the last first), so called, not from Zeno, their founder, nor from his city; but from the painted porch in Athens, from which he promulged his doctrines, by another route arrived at the same goal with Epicurus. In their abstractions they discovered, I had almost said, that pain was pleasure; at least, that pain was no evil. Epicurus taught that pleasure was the only good-Zeno, that virtue alone was bliss-Epicurus that virtue was only valuable as the means of pleasure. Both agreed in demanding from their disciples an absolute command over their passions, and both supposed it practicable. They both boldly asserted that the philosophy which they taught was the only way to happiness; and yet both agreed that there was no future state of happiness or misery, and equally justified selfmurder! Could any evidence dissipate the delusion of the competency of philosophy to be either the standard of virtue or the guide of life, methinks it might be found in this best of Pagan schools. Amongst its brightest ornaments were Chrysippus, Cato of Utica, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Antoninus the Pious. Plausible in many of their dogmata, prepossessing in their displays of certain virtues, fascinating in some of their theories, most ingenious in all their speculations, they breathed contempt both of pleasure and pain, commanded the extinguishment of passion and appetite, eulogized temperance and selfgovernment, and extolled the dignity of virtue and the rules of modesty and piety; while themselves were addicted to vicious indulgences, sensual pleasures, and even to gross intemperance itself. Zeno drank to excess, and killed himself rather than endure the pain of a broken finger; Chrysippus died of a surfeit of sacrificial wine; Cleanthus followed his example; while Cato of Utica thrust the dagger into his own heart; Epictetus gave to the human will a power almighty, above that of the gods themselves, and advised suicide in certain cases; Seneca taught that no man ought to fear God—that a vir tuous man equalled him in happiness: he justified the drunkenness of Cato, and pleaded for self-murder; while many of them indulged in the grosser and more nameless vices of the Pagan world. Of none of the Stoics could as much in truth be said as Cowley says of Epicurus :— "His life he to his doctrine brought, And in a garden's shade that sovereign pleasure Whoever a true Epicure would be, followers compared the soul to the harmony of a musical instrument, which has no existence when the instrument is destroyed. The Platonic school, or the old Academic, is not much better than the Peripatetic. Plato is designedly obscure in all his speculations on Divinity. He affirms one Supreme God, but he had no concern in the creation or government of the world, and recommended the people to worship a plurality of inferior deities. He extols the oracles, and advises the consultation of them in all matters of religion and worship. He prescribed great licentiousness of manners; allows, and sometimes commands, the exposing and destroying of children. He declares that on proper occasions lying is not only He argues The Peripatetic school, so denominated from the peripaton, or walk of the Lyceum, in which Aristotle taught his philosophy, next claims our attention. With the moral part of this theory our demonstration lies. Aristotle, then, with all his prodigious parts, great erudition, and vari-profitable, but lawful. ous and profound studies, was a the immortality of the soul, and speaks polytheist. He asserted the eternity of the rewards and punishments of a of the world both in matter and form. future life. He sometimes, however, He, indeed, held a supreme abstract equivocates on this subject, and seems intelligence, which he called the Su- to believe in the transmigration of preme God-pretty much the anima souls; while again he will have the mundi of Pythagoras. This Supreme soul immortal from a necessity of naGod was the life and soul of all the ture, or from an antecedent immorgods inferior; for all the stars were, tality. He taught the Greeks to with him, true and eternal gods. He love themselves, and hate the barbadenied that Providence ever stooped rians as enemies--by which term he beneath the moon, and consequently denoted all other nations. superintended not human affairs. His moral sentiments and theories, as a matter of course, corresponded with his theological views. He not only approved, but prescribed the exposing and destroying of weak and sickly children. He encouraged revenge. Vacillating in all his theories of the soul, he doubted at one time its future existence, and finally concludes the ninth chapter of his 3rd Book of Ethics with these words: "Death is the most dreadful of all things, for that is the end of our existence; for to him that is dead there seems nothing farther to remain, whether good or evil." Dicæarchus, one of his most learned followers, whom Cicero extols, wrote books to prove that souls are mortal; and many of his But yet there remains Socrates himself, the father of the Greek moral philosophy. Though not followed in the best part of his speculations by even his own Plato, who, nevertheless, with the exception of Xenophon in some points, followed him closer than any of the Socratic school, he clearly asserted and boldly fought one God, the immortality of the soul, and future retributions. Paradoxical however though it be, he did not fully believe the doctrine which he taught. Sometimes he believed it; at other times, his reasonings not fully proving it, he seems to doubt it. He appears, indeed, to have died a sceptic. both taught and practised polytheism, and amongst his last words ordered a sacrifice to the god of physic. He Tradition, then, and not induction, originated in the minds of the Socratic school all the light of the origin, moral obligations, and destiny of man, which this school and the Grecian and the Roman world from it en As Plato represents him in his its own researches, and seeks for a Phædon the more nearly he approach-foundation in the traditions of former ed death, the more he doubted his times? own doctrine. To his surrounding friends he says, "I hope that I shall go to good men after death; but this I will not absolutely affirm." Again, "That these things are so, as I have represented them, it does not become any man of understanding to affirm;joyed. though, if it appear that the soul is immortal, it seems reasonable to think that either such things, or something like them, are true with regard to our souls and their habitations after death, and that it is worth making a trial, for the trial is noble." To his judges he says, "There is much ground to hope that death is good; for it must necessarily be one of the two; either the dead man is nothing, and hath not a sense of any thing, or it is only a change or migration of the soul hence to another place according to what we are told, Kata ta legomena.” Finally he says, "Those who live there are both in other respects happier than we, and also in this, that ever after they are immortal." If the things which are told us are true, Eiper ta legomena alethe estin, Such are the triumphs of philosophy! Such is its power to guide the life, the piety, the morality, the destiny of man !! But we are about still farther to despoil it of the little light that it has, and divest it of all its glory, even in the points of which the three mightiest of Grecian philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle most deserve and most enjoyed the admiration of the world. Remember the last words of Socrates-" If, indeed, the things that have been told us are true." Who, then, will have the temerity to affirm that moral philosophy is a true science; that it builds upon its own foundation, and uses only its own materials; while its father and founder at last shifts it off the basis of reason and The history of the whole matter is this :-The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, the Greeks stole from the Egyptians and Phenicians, while they borrowed from the Chaldeans and Assyrians, who stole from the Abrahamic family all their notions of the spirituality, eternity, and unity of God, the primitive state of man, his fall, sacrifice, priests, altars, immortality of the soul, a future state, eternal judgment, and the ultimate retribution of all men according to their works. Hence, sensible Philosophy, or human reason, is very inadequate to the discovery of ideas on any of the greatest points involved in the origin, obligations, and destiny of man. and learned men of former times and of the present day, assign to tradition or revelation, handed down orally, and neither to "natural religion" nor moral philosophy, all knowledge upon these subjects. Great and learned names may be found in abundance to sanction the conclusion to which we are forced to come from the facts now standing in our horizon. These will say with the distinguished Puffendorf in his law of nations: "It is very probable that God himself taught the first men the chief heads of natural laws which were preserved and spread abroad by means of education and custom.' Nature," says Plutarch in his treatise on education, nature without learning and instruction is a blind thing." "Vice can have access to the soul by many parts of the body, but Virtue can lay hold of a young man only by his ears.' And man," says Plato, " if not properly 66 66 H 66 untractable of all earthly animals." And, stranger still, no man has ever been found possessed of a spiritual conception by the mere exercise of his own powers," declares a host of observers. educated, is the wildest and most That the first man never was an infant, reason and philosophy are compelled to admit ; and that he was spoken to before he spoke, and that by a superior being, are postulates which will not be demanded, sooner than conceded, by every man having any pretensions to science or reason. Of course, then, the adult Adam received knowledge orally from its fountain-knowledge of his origin, nature, relations, obligations, and destiny. If he did not fully comprehend each or all of these, he could not possibly be ignorant of any one of them. He lived for nine hundred and thirty years, an adult life all the time; and certainly was the oracle of the world for the first thousand years of its history. But, to complete our premises, two things are yet wanting a just view of tradition, and of the comparative claims of reason and faith as faculties or powers of acquiring knowledge of the highest and most important character. On these we have time but for a few remarks. And first, of tradition, as the first and chief source of knowledge to man. "tra Before an effort to sketch the history of ancient tradition, we must define the term. According to Milton, a name of high renown, dition is any thing delivered orally from age to age." But, in its more enlarged signification it denotes any thing-fact, event, opinion-handed down to us, whether by word or writing. Still the ancient traditions being accounts from things delivered from mouth to mouth, without written memorials, while speaking of them I shall use the term as defined by Milton, Things delivered orally from age to age. Few of us have paid much attention either to the nature of the amount of that knowledge possessed in the remotest ages of the world; nor to the safe and direct manner by which it was communicated from one generation to another. It was a true and practical knowledge of those five elements which was essential to happiness. On none of these points did man, could man, begin to speculate or philosophize till tradition was corrupted by fable, and men began to doubt. Hence the era of philosophy, mental and moral, was the era of scepticism. For, in the name of reason, why should man institute a demonstration a priori or a posteriori to ascertain a fact for which he had direct, positive, and unequivocal evidence? But there were two witnesses from the beginning; and two witnesses most credible, because every feeling of human nature compelled Adam and Eve to give a true history of their experience to their own children. Methuselah, who lived to the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine, the very year of the deluge, conversed with Adam for two hundred and fortythree years; and with Shem, the son of Noah, for almost one hundred years. Thus, not only all the experience, all the acquisitions of these two great and learned sages (for great and learned they truly were), but all the science of the antediluvian world were carried down to Shem by the lips of one man. Now, as Shem lived five hundred years after the flood, he must have been the greatest of moral oracles that ever lived. All antiquity, from Adam to himself, came to his ears by one man, corroborated, too, by the concurrent testimony of many others. The amount and variety of knowledge which Methuse'ah possessed and communicated would, without much reflection, be almost incredible to any one who has not closely looked into the fragments of sacred history which are extant at this hour. Be |