And, indeed, unless this were the case, that souls were immortal, the souls of the noblest of men would not aspire above all things to an immortality of glory.' Why need I ence. But surely, if life itself be pleasing, and even though there were no existence beyond the grave-life might be still, by the benevolence of Him who conferred it, have been rendered a source of pleasure; it is not wonderful that we should desire futurity, since futurity is only protracted life. It would, indeed, have been worthy of our astonishment if man, loving his present life, and knowing that it was to terminate in the space of a very few years, should not have regretted the termination of what he loved; that is to say, should not have wished the continuance of it beyond the period of its melancholy close. The universal desire then, even if the desire were truly universal, would prove nothing, but the goodness of Him who has made the realities of life—or if not the realities, the hopes of life-so pleasing that the mere loss of what is possessed, or hoped, appears like a positive evil of the most afflicting kind."-Dr. Brown's Moral Philosophy, sec. 97.

If he

"I am fully persuaded that one of the best springs of generous and worthy actions is having generous and worthy thoughts of ourselves. Whoever has a mean opinion of the dignity of his nature will act in no higher a rank than he has allotted himself in his own estimation considers his being as circumscribed by the uncertain term of a few years, his designs will be contracted into the same narrow space he imagines is to bound his existence. How can he exalt his thoughts to any thing great and noble, who only believes that after a short turn on the stage of this world, he is to sink into oblivion, and to lose his consciousness forever? For this reason I am of opinion that so useful and elevated a contemplation as that of the soul's immortality can not be resumed too often. There is not a more improving exercise to the human mind than to be frequently reviewing its own great privileges and endowments, nor a more effectual means to awaken in us an ambition raised above low objects and little pursuits, than to value ourselves as heirs of eternity."-Hughes. Spectator, No. 210.

Upon the love of posthumous fame, Dr. Johnson has the following observations: "If the love of fame is so far indulged by the mind as to become independent and predominant; it is dangerous and irregular, but it may be usefully employed as an inferior and secondary motive, and will serve sometimes to revive our activity, when we begin to languish and lose sight of that more certain, more valuable, and more durable reward, which ought always to be our first hope and our last. But it must be strongly impressed upon our minds that virtue is not to be pursued as one of the means to fame; but fame to be accepted as the only recompense which mortals can bestow on virtue, to be accepted with complacence, but not sought with eagerness Simply to be remembered is no advantage; it is a privilege which satire as well as panegyric can confer, and is not more enjoyed by Titus or Constantine than by Timocrean of Rhodes, of whom we only know from his epitaph, that he had eaten many a meal, drank many a flagon, and uttered many a reproach. The true satisfaction which is to be drawn from the consciousness that we shall share the attention of future times must arise from the

adduce that the wisest man ever dies with the greatest equanimity, the most foolish with the least? Does it not seem to you that the soul, which sees more and further, sees that it is passing to a better state, while that body, whose vision is duller, does not see it? I, indeed, am transported with eagerness to see your fathers, whom I have respected and loved: nor in truth is it those only I desire to meet whom I myself have known; but those also of whom I have heard or read, and have myself written. Whither, indeed, as I proceed, no one assuredly should easily force me back, nor, as they did with Pelias, cook me again to youth. For if any god should grant me, that from this period of life I should become a child again and cry in the cradle, I should earnestly refuse it: nor in truth should I like, after having run, as it were, my course, to be called back to the starting-place' from the goal. For what comfort has life? What trouble has it not, rather? But grant that it has; yet it assuredly has either satiety or limitation (of its pleasures). For I am not disposed to lament the loss of life, which many men, and those learned men too, have often done; neither do I regret that I have lived since I have lived in such a way that I conceive I was not born in vain: and from this life I depart as from a temporary lodging, not as from a home. For nature has assigned it to us as an inn to sojourn in, not a place of habitation. Oh, glorious day! when I shall depart to that divine company and assemblage of spirits, and quit this troubled and polluted scene. For I shall go not only to those great men of whom I have spoken before, but also to my hope that with our name our virtues will be propagated, and that those whom we can not benefit in our lives, may receive instruction from our examples and incitement from our renown."-Rambler, No. 49.

1 "Though I think no man could live well once, but he that could live twice, yet, for my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my days; not upon Cicero's ground, because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse. I find my growing judgment daily instruct me how to be better, but my untamed affections and confirmed vitiosity make me daily do worse. I find in my confirmed age the same sins I discovered in my youth; I committed many then, because I was a child; and because I commit them still, I am yet an infant; therefore I perceive a man may be twice a child before the days of dotage, and stand in need of Eson's bath before threescore." -Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, ch. 42.

2 Ad carceres a calce: carceres or repagula, from which the horses started. A line called creta or calx was drawn, to mark the end of the

course.

friend Cato,' than whom never was better man born, nor more distinguished for pious affection; whose body was burned by me, whereas, on the contrary, it was fitting that mine should be burned by him. But his soul not deserting

me, but oft looking back, no doubt departed to those regions whither it saw that I myself was destined to come. Which, though a distress to me, I seemed patiently to endure : not that I bore it with indifference, but I comforted myself with the recollection that the separation and distance between us would not continue long. For these reasons, O Scipio (since you said that you with Lælius were accustomed to wonder at this), old age is tolerable to me, and not only not irksome, but even delightful. And if I am wrong in this, that I believe the souls of men to be immortal, I willingly delude myself: nor do I desire that this mistake, in which I take pleasure, should be wrested from me as long as I live; but if I, when dead, shall have no consciousness, as some narrow-minded philosophers imagine, I do not fear lest dead philosophers should ridicule this my delusion. But if we are not destined to be immortal, yet it is a desirable thing for a man to expire at his fit time. For, as nature prescribes a boundary to all other things, so does she also to life. Now old age is the consummation of life, just as of a play; from the fatigue of which we ought to escape, especially when satiety is superadded. This is what I had to say on the subject of old age; to which may you arrive! that, after having experienced the truth of those statements which you have heard from me, you may be enabled to give them your approbation.

1 This apostrophe has suggested to the greatest of modern pulpit orators one of his most eloquent perorations. "If," says Robert Hall, "the mere conception of the reunion of good men in a future state infused a momentary rapture into the mind of Tully; if an airy speculation, for there is reason to fear it had little hold on his convictions, could inspire him with such delight, what may we be expected to feel who are assured of such an event by the true sayings of God! How should we rejoice in the prospect-the certainty, rather, of spending a blissful eternity with those whom we loved on earth; of seeing them emerge from the ruins of the tomb, and the deeper ruins of the fall, not only uninjured, but refined and perfected. What delight will it afford to renew the sweet counsel we have taken together, to recount the toils of combat and the labor of the way, and to approach not the house but the throne of God in company, in order to join in the symphony of heavenly voices, and lose ourselves amid the splendors and fruitions of the beatific vision."Funeral Sermon for Dr. Ryland.

PARADOXES.

ADDRESSED TO MARCUS BRUTUS.

I HAVE often observed, O Brutus, that your uncle Cato, when he delivered his opinion in the senate, was accustomed to handle important points of philosophy, inconsistent with popular and forensic usage; but that yet, in speaking, he managed them so that even these seemed to the people worthy of approbation; which was SO much the greater excellency in him, than either in you or in me, because we are more conversant in that philosophy which has produced a copiousness of expression, and in which those things are propounded which do not widely differ from the popular opinion. But Cato, in my opinion a complete Stoic, both holds those notions which certainly do not approve themselves to the common people; and belongs to that sect which aims at no embellishments, and does not spin out an argument. He therefore succeeds in what he has purposed, by certain pithy and, as it were, stimulating questions. There is, however, nothing so incredible that it may not be made plausible by eloquence; nothing so rough and uncultivated that it may not, in oratory, become brilliant and polished.

As I have been accustomed to think thus, I have made a bolder attempt than he himself did of whom I am speaking. For Cato is accustomed to treat stoically of magnanimity, of modesty, of death, and of all the glory of virtue, of the immortal gods, and of patriotism, with the addition of the ornaments of eloquence. But I have, for amusement, digested. into common-places those topics which the Stoics scarcely prove in their retirement and in their schools. Such topics are termed, even by themselves, paradoxes, because they are remarkable, and contrary to the opinion of all men. I have been desirous of trying whether they might not come into publicity, that is before the forum, and be so expressed as to be approved; or whether learned

expressions were one thing, and a popular mode of address another. I undertook this with the more pleasure, because these very paradoxes, as they are termed, appear to me to be the most Socratic, and by far the most true. Accept therefore this little work, composed during these shorter nights, since that work of my longer watchings appeared in your name. You will have here a specimen of the manner I have been accustomed to adopt when I accommodate those things which in the schools are termed theses to our oratorical manner of speaking. I do not, however, expect that you will look upon yourself as indebted to me for this performance which is not such as to be placed, like the Minerva of Phidias, in a citadel, but still such as may appear to have issued from the same studio.

PARADOX I.

THAT VIRTUE IS THE ONLY GOOD.

I AM apprehensive that this position may seem to some among you to have been derived from the schools of the Stoics, and not from my own sentiments. Yet I will tell you my real opinion, and that too more briefly than so important a matter requires to be discussed. By Hercules, I never was one who reckoned among good and desirable

1 The ethical doctrines of the Stoics have attracted most attention, as exhibited in the lives of distinguished Greeks and Romans. To live according to nature was the basis of their ethical system; but by this it was not meant that a man should follow his own particular nature; he must make his life conformable to the nature of the whole of things. This principle is the foundation of all morality; and it follows that morality is connected with philosophy. To know what is our relation to the whole of things, is to know what we ought to be and to do. This fundamental principle of the Stoics is indisputable, but its application is not always easy, nor did they all agree in their exposition of it. Some things were good, some bad, and some indifferent; the only good things were virtue, wisdom, justice, temperance, and the like. The truly wise man possesses all knowledge; he is perfect and sufficient in himself; he despises all that subjects to its power the rest of mankind; he feels pain, but he is not conquered by it. But the morality of the Stoics, at least in the later periods, though it rested on a basis apparently so sound, permitted the wise man to do nearly every thing that he liked. Such a system, it has been well observed, might do for the imaginary wise man of the Stoics; but it was not a system whose general adoption was compatible with the existence of any actual society.