The Stoic, (for we shall take the last first,) so called, not from Zeno, their founder, nor from his city; but from the painted porch in Athens, from which he promulged his doctrines, by another route arrived at the same goal with Epicurus. In their abstractions they discovered, I had almost said, that pain was pleasure; at least, that pain was no evil. Epicurus taught that pleasure was the only goodZeno, that virtue alone was bliss-Epicurus, that virtue was only valuable as the means of pleasure. Both agreed in demanding from their disciples an absolute command over their passions, and both supposed it practicable. They both boldly asserted that the philosophy which they taught taught was the only way to happiness; and yet both agreed that there was no future state of happiness or misery, and equally justified self-murder! Could any evidence dissipate the delusion of the competency of philosophy to be either the standard of virtue or the guide of life, methinks it might be found in this best of Pagan schools. Amongst its brightest ornaments were Chrysippus, Cato of Utica, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Antoninus the Pious. Plausible in many of their dogmata, prepossessing in their displays of certain virtues, fascinating in some of their theories, most ingenious in all their speculations, they breathed contempt both of pleasure and pain, commanded the extinguishment of passion and appetite, eulogized temperance and self-government, and extolled the dignity of virtue and the rules of modesty and piety; while themselves were addicted to vicious indulgences, sensual pleasures, and even to gross intemperance itself. Zeno drank to excess, and killed himself rather than endure the pain of a broken finger; Chrysippus died of a surfeit of sacrificial wine; Cleanthus followed his example; while Cato of Utica thrust the dagger into his own heart; Epictetus gave to the human will a power almighty, above that of the gods themselves, and advised suicide in certain cases; Seneca taught that no man ought to fear God-that virtuous man equalled him in happiness: he justified the drunkenness of Cato, and plead for self-murder; while many of them indulged in the grosser and more nameless vices of the Pagan world. Of none of the Stoics could as much in truth be said, as Cowley says of Epicu rus: "His life he to his doctrine brought, And in a garden's shade that sovereign pleasure sought. a The Peripatetic school, so denominated from the peripaton, or walk of the Lyceum in which Aristotle taught his philosophy, next claims our attention. With the moral part of this theory our demonstration lies. Aristotle, then, with all his prodigious parts, great erudition, and various and profound studies, was a polytheist. He asserted the eternity of the world both in matter and form. He, indeed, held a supreme abstract intelligence, which he called the Supreme God-pretty much the anima mundi of Pythagoras. This Supreme God was the life and soul of all the gods inferior; for all the stars were, with him, true and eternal gods. He denied that Providence ever stooped beneath the moon, and consequently superintended not human affairs. His moral sentiments and theories, as a matter of course, corresponded with his theological views. He not only approved, but prescribed the exposing and destroying of weak and sickly children. He encouraged revenge. Vacillating in all his theories of the soul, he doubted at one time its future existence, and finally concludes the ninth chapter of his 3d book of Ethics with these words: "Death is the most dreadful of all things; for that is the end of our existence: for to him that is dead there seems nothing farther to remain, whether good or evil." Dicæarchus, one of his most learned followers, whom Cicero extols, wrote books to prove that souls are mortal; and many of his followers compared the soul to the harmony of a musical instrument, which has no existence when the instrument is destroyed. The Platonic school, or the old Academic, is not much better than the Peripatetic. Plato is designedly obscure in all his speculations on Divinity. He affirms one Supreme God, but he had no concern in the creation or government of the world, and recommended the people to worship a plurality of inferior deities. He extols the oracles, and advises the consultation of them in all matters of religion and worship. He prescribed great licentiousness of manners; allows, and sometimes commands, the exposing and destroying of children. He declares that on proper occasions lying is not only profitable, but lawful. He argues the immortality of the soul, and speaks of the rewards and punishments of a future life He sometimes, however, equivocates on this subject, and seems to believe in the transmigration of souls; while again he will have the soul immortal from a necessity of nature, or from an antecedent immortality. He taught the Greeks to love themselves, and hate the barbarians as enemies; by which term he denoted all other nations. But yet there remains Socrates himself, the father of the Greek moral philosophy. Though not followed in the best part of his specuJations by even his own Plato, who, nevertheless, with the exception of Xenophon in some points, followed him closer than any of the Socratic school, he clearly asserted and boldly taught one God, the immortality of the soul, and future retributions. Paradoxical however though it be, he did not fully believe the doctrine which he taught. Sometimes he believed it; at other times, his reasonings not fully proving it, he seems to doubt it. He appears, indeed, to have died a sceptic. He both taught and practised polytheism, and amongst his last words ordered a sacrifice to the god of physic. As Plato represents him in his Phædon the more nearly he approached death, the more he doubted his own doctrine. To his surrounding friends he says, "I hope that I shall go to good men after death; but this I will not absolutely affirm." But as to his going to the gods he is positive. "If," says he, "I could affirm any thing concerning matters of such a nature, I would affirm this." Again, "That these things are so, as I have represented them, it does not become any man of understanding to affirm; though, if it appear that the soul is immortal, it seems reasonable to think that either such things, or something like them, are true with regard to our souls and their habitations after death; and that it is worth making a trial, for the trial is noble." To his judges he says, "There is much ground to hope that death is good; for it must necessarily be one of the two: either the dead man is nothing, and hath not a sense of any thing, or it is only a change or migration of the soul hence to another place-according to what we are told, Kata ta legomena-Κατα τα λεγομένα. Finally he says, "Those who live there are both in other respects happier than we, and also in this, that ever after they are immortal." If the things which are told us are true, Eiper ta legomena alethe estin. Such are the triumphs of philosophy! Such is its power to guide the life, the piety, the morality, the destiny of man!! But we are about still farther to despoil it of the little light that it has, and divest it of all its glory, even in the points in which the three mightiest of Grecian philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle most deserve and have most enjoyed the admiration of the world. Remember the last words of Socrates - "If, indeed, the things that have been told us are true." Who, then, will have the temerity to affirm that moral philosophy is a true science; that it builds upon its own foundation; and uses only its own materials; while its father and founder at last shifts it off the basis of reason and its own researches, and seeks for a foundation in the traditions of former times? Tradition, then, and not induction, originated in the minds of the Socratic school all the light of the origin, moral obligations, and destiny of man, which this school and the Grecian and the Roman world from it enjoyed. The history of the whole matter is this: -The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, the Greeks stole from the Egyptians and Phenicians, while they borrowed from the Chaldeans and Assyrians, who stole from the Abrahamic family all their notions of the spirituality, eternity, and unity of God, the primitive state of man, his fall, sacrifice, priests, altars, immortality of the soul, a future state, eternal judgment, and the ultimate retribution of all men according to their works. We might, indeed, pursue the same course in reference to the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the ancient Gauls, and trace all the light in in them to the same common origin. The Indians, Egyptians, Phenicians, Greeks, Romans made very great advances in geometry, astronomy, natural history, philosophy, language, politics, oratory, and the fine arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. But in the points before us they degenerated into superstition, mythology, licentiousness, and barbarity. As we examine and compare all the systems of moral philosophy and theology, ascending the streams of antiquity, we find the Druids among the Gauls, the Magi among the Persians, the Brahmins among the Indians, the Philosophers among the Greeks and Romans, all borrowing from one original and universal tradition. The writings of Confucius and Zoroaster, of Berosus and Sanchoniathon, and every ancient monument which has escaped the wreck of time, bears inscribed upon it the same unequivocal testimony. Thus the lawgivers, philosophers, and sages of Greece travelled into Egypt and the East in quest of knowledge. Amongst the Gre cian lawgivers and sages who visited this ancient and celebrated country in search of new ideas, were Orpheus, Rhadamanthus, Minos, Lycaon, Triptolemus, Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, &c.; by whom the Greeks, as generally acknowledged by themselves, imported from Egypt their theology, philosophy, and learning. Philosophy, or human reason, as may appear in the sequel, is very inadequate to the discovery of ideas on any of the great points involved in the origin, obligations, and destiny of man. Hence, sensible and learned men of former times and of the present day, assign to tradition or revelation, handed down orally, and neither to "natural religion" nor moral philosophy, all knowledge upon these subjects. Great and learned names may be found in abundance to sanction the conclusion to which we are forced to come from the facts now standing in our horizon. These will say with the distinguished Puffendorf in his law of nations:* "It is very probable that God himself taught the first men the chief heads of natural laws which were preserved and spread abroad by means of education and custom." "Nature," says Plutarch in his treatise on education, "nature without learning or instruction is a blind thing." "Vice can have access to the soul by many parts of the body, but Virtue can lay hold of a young man only by his ears." And "man," says Plato, "if not properly educated, is the wildest and most untractable of all earthly animals." And, stranger still, "no man has ever been found possessed of a spiritual conception by the mere exercise of his own powers," declares a host of close observers. But, to complete our premises, two things are yet wanting-a just view of tradition, and of the comparative claims of reason and faith as faculties or powers of acquiring knowledge of the highest and most important character. On these we have time but for a few remarks. And first, of tradition as the first and chief source of knowledge to man. Before an effort to sketch the history of ancient tradition, we must define the term. According to Milton, a name of high renown, "tradition is any thing delivered orally from age to age." But, in its more enlarged signification it denotes any thing-fact, event, opinionhanded down to us, whether by word or writing. Still the ancient traditions being accounts of things delivered from mouth to mouth, without written memorials, while speaking of them I shall use the term as defined by Milton-Things delivered orally from age to age. Few of us have paid much attention either to the nature or the amount of that knowledge possessed in the remotest ages of the world; nor to the safe and direct manner by which it was communicated from one generation to another. It was a true and practical knowledge of those five elements which was essential to the science of happiness. On no one of these points did man, could man, begin to speculate or philosophize till tradition was corrupted by fable, and men began to, doubt. Hence the era of philosophy, mental and moral, was the era of scepticism. For, in the name of reason, why should a man institute a demonstration a priori or a posteriori to ascertain a fact for which he had direct, positive, and unequivocal evidence? That the first man never was an infant, reason and philosophy are compelled to admit; and that he was spoken to before he spoke, and that by a superior being, are postulates which will not be demanded, sooner than conceded, by every man having any pretensions to science * Vol. 2., chap. 3, sect, 20. or reason. Of course, then, the adult Adam received knowledge orally from its fountain-knowledge of his origin, nature, relations, obligations, and destiny. If he did not fully comprehend each or all of these, he could not possibly be ignorant of any one of them. He lived for nine hundred and thirty years, an adult life all the time; and certainly was the oracle of the world for the first thousand years of its history. But there were two witnesses from the beginning; and two witnesses most credible, because every feeling of human nature compelled Adam and Eve to give a true history of their experience to their own children. Methuselah, who lived to the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine, the very year of the deluge, conversed with Adam for two hundred and forty-three years; and with Shem, the son of Noah, for almost one hundred years. Thus, not only all the experience, all the aequisitions of these two great and learned sages, (for great and learned they truly were,) but all the science of the antediluvian world was carried down to Shem by the lips of one man. Now, as Shem lived five hundred years after the flood, he must have been the greatest of moral oracles that ever lived. All antiquity-from Adam to himself, came to his ears by one man, corroborated too by the concurrent testimony of many others. The amount and variety of knowledge which Methuselah possessed and communicated would, without much reflection, be almost incredible to any one who has not closely looked into the fragments of sacred history which are extant at this hour. Besides, their knowledge of geology, astronomy, natural history, chronology, and general physics, was much more extensive than we imagine. Enoch, the father of Methuselah, the most enlightened and perfect man that lived during the first two thousand years of human history, was a most gifted teacher of the science of morals. He taught a future judgment, the coming of the Lord, with ten thousand of his saints, to punish the wicked; and in his translation to heaven, body, soul, and spirit, forty-four years before Seth the immediate son of Adam died, gave an exemplification of the immortality of the saints to all his contemporaries, and to posterity through all generations.At the time of his translation Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech were all of mature age and reason; so that all the generations between Adam and Noah had the advantage of the doctrine, manner of life, and translation of Enoch. The origin of the universe and of man, his nature, relations, obligations, and destiny were, therefore, matters of fact, or direct testimony amongst the ante. diluvians, and faithfully communicated from the mouth of one individual, corroborated by many concurrent witnesses, into the ears of Shem. Shem, too, became an oracle of the postdiluvians for five hundred years; spending one hundred and fifty years of his life with Abraham, and fifty with Isaac his son. Thus the entire experience of Adam came to Shem through one individual, and passed through him to Isaac; so that from the tongue of Methuselah the words of Adam fell upon the ears of Shem, and from the tongue of Shem may have fallen upon the ears of Abraham and Isaac. The vast knowledge of ten antediluvian generations, with the sub 1 |