pen by chance, when no wisdom of ours is equal to the task of measuring the wisdom by which they are governed?" The demonstration is carried out through the physical world, and the bodily structure of man himself, and would seem to be complete. But in the third book Cotta is put up to refute this doctrine of the Stoics, as he had done that of the Epicureans. All this argument of the one ordering mind fails entirely to convince him. Nevertheless he is a priest, and highly conservative; and before he confutes Balbus he begins by assuring him: "I always will defend, and always have defended the sacred rites and ceremonies delivered down to us concerning the immortal gods from our ancestors: nor will the speech of any one, learned or unlearned, move me from my ancestral opinion respecting the worship of the immortal gods. As to religion I follow Coruncanius, Scipio, and Scævola, pontifices maximi, not Zeno, or Cleanthes, or Chrysippus." We are reminded here of the answer of our own Scipio Africanus to a fervent spirit who invited him to join in prayer for the unity of all professing Christians. "I presume," he said, "you do not expect me, as her Majesty's adviser, to state to her that I do not consider the religion established by law to be true." Now this was just the case with the Romans whom Cicero puts on the stage, and with himself. Cicero the statesman would maintain the Roman religion † Id. iii. 2.

*De Nat. Deor. ii. 38.

"concerning the immortal gods" on the basis of tradition, for the sake of state policy: Cicero the philosopher thinks it more probable that there is a ruling mind in the universe than that there is not, though not a word is hinted as to that mind being personal: but Cicero the man remains untouched in all this. He is perfectly calm and impassive, balancing opposite opinions as to there being gods or not, with a preference for their existence; but to fall on his knees as a creature, and adore the God who made heaven and earth, whose life within supports him, whose gift is the body which he has elaborately described, and the mind which is his pride and delight: this is a thought which he never comes near. His writings are full of experience of social life, knowledge of the political world, appreciation of men and things, full of wit, liveliness, and observation. He had even in a sort of rhetorical way of his own run over a large part of the circle of human knowledge, and studied a great variety of philosophical systems, which comprehended the whole universe. But there are two ideas which simply never occurred to him: the idea of God as the Creator, Preserver, and Rewarder of men; and the idea of the soul of man as having a personal, enduring, responsible existence.

Such is the belief of the greatest orator and genius of Rome, the head of the conservative party, the Latinizer of Hellenic philosophy; of whom there is every reason to think that his disposition was more

kindly and his life more moral than the disposition and the life of by far the greater number, at least of eminent public men, among his contemporaries.

But there are three critical points in his life at which we must glance in order to observe the effect which his belief had upon his conduct.

The first is his exile. Having by his consulship saved Rome, and taken the first rank in the Senate, he was felt to be an obstacle in the way of the man who was bent on ruling all. As Cicero was not prepared to become the tool of Cæsar, Clodius was set upon him. Betrayed by Pompey and by all his friends, he is driven from the city which he had saved. Forthwith that vision which made the sunshine of his life, "the consentient praise of the good, the uncorrupt expression of those who judge rightly upon excellent virtue, that which is virtue's echo," becomes overclouded. Driven back into himself, away from Rome, the contests and the triumphs of the forum and the senatehouse, and reduced to the testimony of his own conscience, this man proclaimed of late the father of his country collapses utterly. He whines and begs for his soul's daily food a little human praise: no smile of earth or sea in his enforced wandering, no caress of wife or child, can win from him an answering glance: until having been sufficiently humbled and broken for the purpose of those who had banished him, he is allowed to return, and to fancy himself again the first man in Rome.

Twelve eventful years succeed, in which Cicero is doomed to witness the growth of Cæsar's inordinate power: the flight, defeat, and death of Pompey, the final destruction of the Senate's authority. He has learnt to bend his neck to the conqueror, to abuse his dominion in private as the ruin of all honour and dignity, and extol him as the most clement of men in public, when the severest of domestic afflictions overtakes him-he loses his favourite daughter Tullia. Here was a trial requiring all the consolation which religion and piety could give. He threw himself upon books; his friends comforted him to their utmost. We have extant a letter from Servius Sulpicius, glowing with poetry and eloquence, but betraying the utter inanity of the friend's power to console, the utter hopelessness of the father's grief. "If there be any sense even in those under the earth, such was her love, such her affection to all her friends, that she would not desire to mourn.' If there be any sense even in those under the earth, -this was the measure of the comfort which Sulpicius could give and Cicero receive. Here is the practical value of those Platonic disquisitions on the immortality of the soul. Cicero is uncertain whether his daughter has any sense after death, and finally resolves to build a temple wherein he may worship her: in which he would only have exercised a liberty such as any heathen then possessed, and

you

*Cic. ad Fam. iv. 5.

such as many used; "and thee," he cries, "O best and most learned of women, admitted into the assembly of the gods with their own consent, I will consecrate to the regard of all mortals."*

Once more. A few months pass: Julius, the noblest of tyrants, falls by the hands of conspirators, who dare not trust Cicero with their secret, but whose deed he applauds to the echo. Cicero looks round him, and beholds, in spite of Cæsar's disappearance, his temple of glory in ruins: his great model commonwealth, whose growth through ages, whose ancestral wisdom and long-descended piety he set forth with his utmost power, is gone for ever, irretrievably ruined by internal corruption. Antony the reveller seizes hold of it on one side, and the boy Octavius draped in Cæsar's cloak on the other; and before him looms a gigantic despotism steeped in blood. This is the third and crowning trial of his life. And what does it find in him to meet this brunt of fortune? This is the occasion when the inward man comes out; when Liberty, driven from her outward court of public life, retires and enshrines herself in the sanctuary of the conscience. Myriads of Christians have carried out all the sanctities of moral life, and exhibited a courage proof on the one hand against every form of death, and on the

*Quoted by Lactantius from "the Consolation." See Heid, und Jud. p. 607, where other instances are given; especially of a Spartan lady named Epicteta, who deified herself beforehand, with her defunct husband and her children.