and the continuity of Cotta’s argument is broken by considerable gaps in all the manuscripts.  There is a curious tradition, that these portions were carefully torn out by the early Christians, because they might prove too formidable weapons in the hands of unbelievers.  Cotta professes throughout only to raise his objections in the hope that they may be refuted; but his whole reasoning is destructive of any belief in an overruling Providence.  He confesses himself puzzled by that insoluble mystery—­the existence of Evil in a world created and ruled by a beneficent Power.  The gods have given man reason, it is said; but man abuses the gift to evil ends.  “This is the fault”, you say, “of men, not of the gods.  As though the physician should complain of the virulence of the disease, or the pilot of the fury of the tempest!  Though these are but mortal men, even in them it would seem ridiculous.  Who would have asked your help, we should answer, if these difficulties had not arisen?  May we not argue still more strongly in the case of the gods?  The fault, you say, lies in the vices of men.  But you should have given men such a rational faculty as would exclude the possibility of such crimes”.  He sees, as David did, “the ungodly in prosperity”.  The laws of Heaven are mocked, crimes are committed, and “the thunders of Olympian Jove are silent”.  He quotes, as it would always be easy to quote, examples of this from all history:  the most telling and original, perhaps, is the retort of Diagoras, who was called the Atheist, when they showed him in the temple at Samothrace the votive tablets (as they may be seen in some foreign churches now) offered by those shipwrecked seamen who had been saved from drowning.  “Lo, thou that deniest a Providence, behold here how many have been saved by prayer to the gods!” “Yea”, was his reply; “but where are those commemorated who were drowned?”

The Dialogue ends with no resolution of the difficulties, and no conclusion as to the points in question.  Cicero, who is the narrator of the imaginary conference, gives it as his opinion that the arguments of the Stoic seemed to him to have “the greater probability”.  It was the great tenet of the school which he most affected, that probability was the nearest approach that man could make to speculative truth.  “We are not among those”, he says, “to whom there seems to be no such thing as truth; but we say that all truths have some falsehoods attached to them which have so strong a resemblance to truth, that in such cases there is no certain note of distinction which can determine our judgment and assent.  The consequence of which is that there are many things probable; and although they are not subjects of actual perception to our senses, yet they have so grand and glorious an aspect that a wise man governs his life thereby".[1] It remained for one of our ablest and most philosophical Christian writers to prove that in such matters probability was practically equivalent to demonstration.[2] Cicero’s own form of scepticism in religious matters is perhaps very nearly expressed in the striking anecdote which he puts, in this dialogue, into the mouth of the Epicurean.