The second great defect in the Gentile philosophy was, that it wanted some suitable reward proportioned to the better part of man, his mind, as an encouragement for his progress in virtue.  The difficulties they met with upon the score of this default were great, and not to be accounted for:  Bodily goods, being only suitable to bodily wants, are no rest at all for the mind; and, if they were, yet are they not the proper fruits of wisdom and virtue, being equally attainable by the ignorant and wicked.  Now, human nature is so constituted, that we can never pursue anything heartily but upon hopes of a reward.  If we run a race, it is in expectation of a prize, and the greater the prize the faster we run; for an incorruptible crown, if we understand it and believe it to be such, more than a corruptible one.  But some of the philosophers gave all this quite another turn, and pretended to refine so far, as to call virtue its own reward, and worthy to be followed only for itself:  Whereas, if there be anything in this more than the sound of the words, it is at least too abstracted to become a universal influencing principle in the world, and therefore could not be of general use.

It was the want of assigning some happiness, proportioned to the soul of man, that caused many of them, either, on the one hand, to be sour and morose, supercilious and untreatable; or, on the other, to fall into the vulgar pursuits of common men, to hunt after greatness and riches, to make their court, and to serve occasions; as Plato did to the younger Dionysius, and Aristotle to Alexander the Great.  So impossible is it for a man, who looks no further than the present world, to fix himself long in a contemplation where the present world has no part:  He has no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never expect to remove the earth he rests upon, while he has no support beside for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand.  To talk of bearing pain and grief, without any sort of present or future hope, cannot be purely greatness of spirit; there must be a mixture in it of affectation, and an alloy of pride, or perhaps is wholly counterfeit.

It is true there has been all along in the world a notion of rewards and punishments in another life; but it seems to have rather served as an entertainment to poets, or as a terror of children, than a settled principle, by which men pretended to govern any of their actions.  The last celebrated words of Socrates, a little before his death, do not seem to reckon or build much upon any such opinion; and Caesar made no scruple to disown it, and ridicule it in open senate.

Thirdly, The greatest and wisest of all their philosophers were never able to give any satisfaction, to others and themselves, in their notions of a Deity.  They were often extremely gross and absurd in their conceptions; and those who made the fairest conjectures are such as were generally allowed by the learned to have seen the system of Moses, if I may so call it, who was in great reputation at that time in the heathen world, as we find by Diodonis, Justin, Longinus, and other authors; for the rest, the wisest among them laid aside all notions after a Deity, as a disquisition vain and fruitless, which indeed it was, upon unrevealed principles; and those who ventured to engage too far fell into incoherence and confusion.