he said that in Plato and in Cicero he met with many utterances which were beautiful and wise, but among them all he never found, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”  Glorious as was the wisdom of ancient thought, its knowledge respecting the indwelling of the Spirit, the resurrection of the body, and the forgiveness of sins, was but fragmentary and vague.  Bishop Butler has justly remarked that “The great doctrines of a future state, the dangers of a course of wickedness, and the efficacy of repentance are not only confirmed in the Gospel, but are taught, especially the last is, with a degree of light to which that of nature is darkness.”

[Footnote 70:  Xen.  Mem. 1, iv. 14; Plato, Alcib. ii.]

The morality of Paganism was, on its own confession, insufficient.  It was tentative, where Christianity is authoritative:  it was dim and partial, where Christianity is bright and complete; it was inadequate to rouse the sluggish carelessness of mankind, where Christianity came in with an imperial and awakening power; it gives only a rule, where Christianity supplies a principle.  And even where its teachings were absolutely coincident with those of Scripture, it failed to ratify them with a sufficient sanction; it failed to announce them with the same powerful and contagious ardour; it failed to furnish an absolutely faultless and vivid example of their practice; it failed to inspire them with an irresistible motive; it failed to support them with a powerful comfort under the difficulties which were sure to be encountered in the aim after a consistent and holy life.

The attempts of the Christian Fathers to show that the truths of ancient philosophy were borrowed from Scripture are due in some cases to ignorance and in some to a want of perfect honesty in controversial dealing.  That Gideon (Jerubbaal) is identical with the priest Hierombalos who supplied information to Sanchoniathon, the Berytian; that Thales pieced together a philosophy from fragments of Jewish truth learned in Phoenicia; that Pythagoras and Democritus availed themselves of Hebraic traditions, collected during their travels; that Plato is a mere “Atticising Moses;” that Aristotle picked up his ethical system from a Jew whom he met in Asia; that Seneca corresponded with St. Paul:  are assertions every bit as unhistorical and false as that Homer was thinking of Genesis when he described the shield of Achilles, or (as Clemens of Alexandria gravely informs us) that Miltiades won the battle of Marathon by copying the strategy of the battle of Beth-Horon!  To say that Pagan morality “kindled its faded taper at the Gospel light, whether furtively or unconsciously taken,” and that it “dissembled the obligation, and made a boast of the splendour as though it were originally her own, or were sufficient in her hands for the moral illumination of the world;” is to make an assertion wholly untenable.[71] Seneca, Epictetus, Aurelius, are among the truest and loftiest of Pagan moralists, yet Seneca ignored the Christians, Epictetus despised, and Aurelius persecuted them.  All three, so far as they knew anything about the Christians at all, had unhappily been taught to look upon them as the most detestable sect of what they had long regarded as the most degraded and the most detestable of religions.