ousness.

Thus it is of nearer kin to the Divine Being, but at the same time a corporeal being, and so stands in reciprocal action with the human body. It is Heat-matter, communicating Life and movement, and tied to the blood. It is transitory, though it outlasts the body, perhaps so long as to the conflagration of the world. Accordingly it has in the most favourable circumstances the duration of the world-period; but with the running out of this period it must return into the universal æther or Godhead. Its individual existence and consciousness end.* In short, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus know nothing not only of a future world and of a moral or a personal God, but of morality itself as a work of free-will. They preach the nothingness of every human action and affection, and under circumstances advocate suicide, as Zeno, Cleanthes, and Cato, their fellow Stoics practised it. I think them therefore, on the whole, inferior to another whom I shall choose not because his personal character is unimpeachable, not because he has not many defects and weaknesses, not because he is not even wanting in the religious mind. All this is true, and yet he is both nearer to the mass of men among whom he lived, and higher in his views upon morality and religion than those I have mentioned. Further, out of all the great men of antiquity I

* Drawn from the analysis of Stoical doctrine in Döllinger's Heidenthum und Judenthum, pp. 153, 159, 161. This will be found fully borne out by the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Enchiridion and Discourses of Epictetus.

choose Cicero partly because among the Romans it would be hard to find either a higher intelligence or a kindlier disposition; but more still on account of the time at which he lived. His life terminated about a generation before our Lord's advent; and when driven from his occupation as a Roman noble and statesman by the break-up of the Republic, he spent his last years in reviewing the systems of Greek philosophy, and in presenting abstracts of them to his countrymen. He had before him and was familiar with all the riches of the Greek mind from Plato down to his own time, so large a part of which has perished to us. Thus, though he has no pretensions to be a philosopher, or to have a philosophic system of his own-though no student of Aristotle can be satisfied with his vague eclecticism, or study it as a science-yet his sketches of moral and political philosophy and of theology, if it can be so termed, possess this special and, so far as I know, unique interest, that they are copies made in the very last period of ancient heathenism by a great Roman mind of what he considered most noticeable on the theory of life, morals, and human society, out of a vast number of Grecian originals which are otherwise lost. In the majesty of his own matchless style, and the undefinable rhythm of those perfect numbers which show us that prose as well as poetry possesses a hidden harmony of its own-for Cicero's felicity of diction and rhythm is as unattainable as Shakspere's, and

more equable-he has transcribed for us the best, according to his judgment, which twelve generations of thinkers among the countrymen of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Carneades, and Panatius, had to say upon man, society, government, and God. Of this great course of human thought during four hundred years we have but fragments: Cicero had not only the complete web of outward teaching, but the inner soul of living tradition. I remember being struck in a great French cathedral with the idea of a medieval artist, who has placed in the windows the Evangelists on the shoulders of the four great Prophets. Now that. expresses Cicero's position with regard to the great lights of heathenism who went before him, and why I select him as a representative of the heathen mind.

There is no man whose writings are more thoroughly penetrated with his character: we will therefore consider his life and his doctrines together.

The son of a citizen of Arpinum, he began his public life at Rome just as the domination of Sylla portended the ruin which was to happen to the great commonwealth. In the interval of comparative tranquillity which ensued after Sylla's reestablishment of it, he, a new man, by the force of his great powers as an orator and lawyer, worked his way, between the twenty-seventh and the fortyfourth year of his life, through the great offices of state up to the crown of all, the consulship, which

he attained in the last-mentioned year, the first in which he was legally capable of it-an honour so great and rare that a Metellus, an Æmilius, or a Claudius might have been proud of it; while in the maker of his own fortunes it was marvellous. Now the new man, who became at forty-three Consul of Rome at the very height of her greatness, what does he set forth as the grand principle of human action? What else but glory; that is, the approval of his fellow-men; "the consentient praise of the good; the uncorrupt expression of those who judge rightly upon excellent virtue; that which is virtue's echo, and, as being generally an attendant upon upright actions, is not to be rejected by good men.”* For indeed there was an object which filled and dilated his mind; there was a work which was the work of his life. The great fabric of the Roman commonwealth--that structure of ages, the visible home and embodiment of power, law, and dignity, on this his mind's eye loved to rest; and to hold his own in this, to be beloved and respected as a chief and influential citizen of it, this was the work of his life. In the year succeeding Cæsar's death, at the ripe age of sixty-three, he compiled a treatise on social duties,

*Tusc. Disp. ii. 32. Compare Aristotle's character of the μɛyaróψυχος, Ethic. Nic. iv. 3, 15. τῆς ἀρετῆς γὰρ ἀθλον ἡ τιμὴ, καὶ ἀπονέμεται τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς: and just before, 9. εἰ δὲ δὴ μεγάλων ἑαυτὸν ἀξιοῖ ἄξιος ὢν, καὶ μάλιστα τῶν μεγίστων, περὶ ἓν μάλιστα ἂν εἴη. ἡ δ ̓ ἀξία λέγεται πρὸς τὰ ἐκτὸς ἀγαθά. μέγιστον δὲ τοῦτ ̓ ἂν θείημεν ὃ τοῖς θεοῖς ἀπονέμομεν, καὶ οὗ μάλιστ ̓ ἐφίενται οἱ ἐν ἀξιώματι, καὶ τὸ ἐπὶ τοῖς καλλίστοις ἆθλον· τοιοῦτον δὲ ἡ τιμή μέγιστον γὰρ δὴ τοῦτο τῶν ἐκτὸς ἀγαθῶν,

N

which is highly instructive, as giving us a view of the moral and intellectual world in which he lived. In this treatise man comes before us as endued with reason and speech, and thereby broadly distinguished from all classes of brute animals, which, like the sun, moon, and stars, and the revolution of the heavens, are made for his service. Thus he is capable of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, virtues of the greatest importance for the maintenance of human society, which is the highest end contemplated by the writer. This human society, indeed, in one place he states to have been "constituted by the immortal gods;"* and that they who destroy it, destroy with it beneficence, liberality, goodness, and justice; and are therefore to be deemed impious towards the gods: but this great fact remains barren in his hands. For the idea of God is singularly absent from the whole treatise: where his division of subjects would seem naturally to introduce it, it is not found. For instance: "Since, as Plato admirably wrote, we are born not for ourselves alone, and our country claims a part of us, a part our friends; and, as the Stoics say, all the earth's productions are created for the use of men; while men are generated for men's sake, to have a capacity of helping each other: in this we ought to follow nature for our guide, to throw into a common store what may be useful for all, by the interchange of kind offices, by giving

* De Officiis, iii. 6.