virtue; and this object they seek to attain by prescribing to human life fixed principles of action, fixed rules of conduct.  In its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its days of languor and gloom as well as in its days of sunshine and energy, human life has thus always a clue to follow, and may always be making way towards its goal.  Christian morality has not failed to supply to human life aids of this sort.  It has supplied them far more abundantly than many of its critics imagine.  The most exquisite document after those of the New Testament, of all the documents the Christian spirit has ever inspired,—­the Imitation,[184]—­by no means contains the whole of Christian morality; nay, the disparagers of this morality would think themselves sure of triumphing if one agreed to look for it in the Imitation only.  But even the Imitation is full of passages like these:  “Vita sine proposito languida et vaga est";—­“Omni die renovare debemus propositum nostrum, dicentes:  nunc hodie perfecte incipiamus, quia nihil est quod hactenus fecimus";—­“Secundum propositum nostrum est cursus profectus nostri";—­“Raro etiam unum vitium perfecte vincimus, et ad quotidianum profectum non accendimur”; “Semper aliquid certi proponendum est”; “Tibi ipsi violentiam frequenter fac.” (A life without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing;—­Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves:  This day let us make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is nought;—­Our improvement is in proportion to our purpose;—­We hardly ever manage to get completely rid even of one fault, and do not set our hearts on daily_ improvement;—­Always place a definite purpose before thee;—­Get the habit of mastering thine inclination._) These are moral precepts, and moral precepts of the best kind.  As rules to hold possession of our conduct, and to keep us in the right course through outward troubles and inward perplexity, they are equal to the best ever furnished by the great masters of morals—­Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only.  The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws.  The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion.  It is impossible to rise from reading Epictetus[185]or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear.  Honor to the sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it!  Yet, even for the sage, this sense of labor and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes a relative inferiority; the noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles[186]