says, that Plato, when speaking of the gravest moral errors, expresses himself with a lenity which would seem to us extraordinary, if we did not remember that he was himself a Greek.' On his low estimate of the relations between man and woman, compare the same work, p. 570. The saying of Augustine, quoted in the text, is in De civ. Dei, viii. 5.

(16) Such was the argument with which Christian authors subsequently encountered the Platonists, eg., Arnobius (Adv. Gentes, ii. p. 39): You,' he says to the Platonists, seek the salvation of your souls in yourselves, and think you become gods by virtue of your own innate strength. We, on the contrary, promise ourselves nothing from our own weakness, and find, when we look at our own nature, that it has no strength, and is conquered whenever circumstances are adverse, by its own passions,' etc. Compare Harless, Das Buch v. d. ägypt. Mysterien, p. 110.

(17) Neander in the above cited work, 1. Stoicism. The remark on the non-acquaintance of the heathen world with the notion of humility, and the change in the meaning of the word humilitas has been repeatedly made by apologists; compare eg., Stirm, p. 236; Ziethe, p. 38; and see notices in Latin lexicons. Schmidt, p. 14, says, 'Humility, i.e. a low position, was a reason for contempt in the eyes of ancient heathen philosophers (e.g. Cic. Tusc., v. 10); from their purely external standpoint, they could form no conception that the name humility would one day be given to one of the brightest virtues.' It is well known how little Stoicism knew of the virtue of love (compare Schmidt, p. 300), nor is the maxim of the founder of this school, neither forgiveness nor alms,' less so. If other principles were subsequently expressed, this must be attributed to the influence which Christianity had begun to exercise.

(18) Certainly Epicurus meant chiefly intellectual

pleasure, but not severed from bodily pleasure. In his school the consequences of this dangerous principle were soon carried out. Compare Zeller, Die Philoso phie der Griechen, 2d edition, iii. 1, 1, p. 405. That this school knew no independent spiritual power of morality, but only the needful calculation, compare the same work, pp. 406, etc.

(19) Quintil. Instit. i. Proem. Cicero, in Tusc. ii. 4, speaks in the strongest terms of the striking contrast between the doctrines and the lives of the philosophers, and gives a very bad account of the latter, p. 605; Tholuck, p. 52.

(20) Zeller substantially admits this, although he defends Seneca against the reproaches of a Dio Cassius and others, iii. 1, I. pp. 641, etc. On the morals of Seneca, and the unconscious influence exercised upon him by Christianity, compare Schmidt, pp. 303, etc. Tertullian calls him, Seneca noster De anima, c. 19; compare Schmidt, p. 321.

(21) Eg. the well-known passage from Seneca, De ira, ii. 8, 9: Everything is full of vices and crimes; more are committed than can be expiated by punishment. There is, as it were, a great struggle who shall exceed in turpitude. Day by day the love of sin increases, and shame diminishes. All respect for goodness and justice has disappeared, and desire rushes whither it will. Crime no longer hides, but exposes itself unabashed to the gaze of all. With such publicity, indeed, has vice appeared, and such is the power it has attained over the minds of all, that innocence is not merely rare, but in general not to be found,' etc. The same, iii. 26: 'Why should I conceal under gentle terms the universal malady? We are all wicked. What one blames in another, each may find in his own breast. We live wickedly among the wicked.' Seneca consoles himself, like many others of those times, with the worlds'

what I had better conceal? Life hidden from its own evil is easier. Never to be born is the happiest lot for man.' Aristot. ap. Plut. Cons. ad Apoll. c. 27. Compare this whole work of Plutarch in general. Thus speaks also the Delphic oracle in Cicero, Tusc. i. 47. And Pliny, H. N. vii., in xxviii. 2: Quapropter hoc primum in remediis animi sui habeat, ex omnibus bonis quæ homini natura tribuit, nullum melius esse tempestiva morte.' Lüken, p. 302: The old poets, in general, are full of these lamentations; and Grecian mythology, much as it was in apparent contrast to the Eastern religions, with their penances and mortifications, by a certain outward appearance of cheerfulness, could not conceal its internal stamp of a certain amount of tragic despair, arising from the struggle of the human mind against adverse and inexorable fate,-We see the philosophers succumb at last to the universal sadness'. Lasaulx, Abhandlung über den Sinn der Edipus-sage, Wurzburg, 1841, pp. 10, &c.: No nation felt more deeply than the Greeks the unhappiness arising from An under the weakness and sin of the natural man. tone of lamentation runs through the external splendour and joy of Grecian life from its beginning to its close. Its greatest poets and sages have repeatedly expressed the sentiment, that no mortal can be esteemed happy before his death. In every mouth we find the same sad cry, It were better never to have been born; and its fellow, Or to die as soon as possible. Achilles, the ideal of Grecian life, was cut off in the flower of life, at the commencement of its history; and Alexander, the Macedonian hero, fell in the prime of his youth, at the close of its national existence (Hegel's Philosophie der Gesch. p. 232). The life of Edipus, too, who may be regarded as a representative Greek, contains little else. than the fact of this secret unhappiness of Greek consciousness.' Lasaulx even interprets his name, of oíroug 'Since Greece, (the two-footed, i.e. man), man of woe. after all, attained only to a false solution of the riddle of human life, it could not but perish.' Lasaulx con

cludes his ingenious treatise (p. 13) with the words, 'Except the legend of Achilles, I know no grander vision of Greek mythology than the history of Edipus. With respect to Greek art, Thiersch expresses himself in the same sense, at least concerning the superlatively beautiful statue of Leucothoe in the Glyptothek of Munich, in the Verhanlungen der Erlanger Philologen Versammlung, p. 46: A gentle touch of melancholy-a main feature of the higher kind of beauty-is here unmistakeable,' etc. I have elsewhere frequently met with this feature in ancient works of art. Compare also Histor.-Polit. Blätter, 1864, vol. liii. No. 9, p. 765, in an article on Count Friedr. Leopold Stolberg, according to his modern biographers, Dr Menge and W. von Bippen.' Amidst the various notices on this subject (viz. of Stolberg on ancient and modern works of art during his stay in Rome, 1791-92), the acute remark which he makes in this work on the character of ancient, in comparison with Christian plastic art, and subsequently confirms in his history of the religion of Jesus, is particularly worthy of attention. He finds, namely, an expression of deep and serious melancholy stamped upon the heads of all the antique statues, whether of gods or men, a certain character of severity and want of sympathy, which hovers, like a dark cloud, suggestive of the notion of death, even upon the features of divine and eternal youth. This judgment has been almost unanimously confirmed by later æsthetics and connoisseurs, by Solger, Schnaase, Lasaulx. Heger compares Niobe, whose beauty was petrified by grief, with the Virgin, whose grief was of an entirely different kind: the sword pierces through her soul, and her heart is broken; but she does not turn into stone. She not only possessed love, but her whole heart was love-the free, concrete, genuine feeling (Innigkeit) which in the midst of bereavement abides in the peace of love. Hegel, Esthetik, published by V. Hotho, 2d edition, vol. iii. 46, and vol. ii. 77, 101, 425, etc. Compare also my lecture, Ueber die Darstellung des Schmerzes in der

bildenden Kunst, 1864. On the Indians, see Fr. Schlegel, Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder, p. 100 If all that the old poets have sung, in isolated passages, of the miseries of existence; if all those sad rays of a truly terrible view of the world. which the notion of a blind fate has scattered amidst the legends and histories of various nations in deeply significant tragedies, were collected into one picture, and the transitory and poetic fancy exchanged for real and lasting earnestness, the peculiarity of the ancient Indian view would thus be best comprehended.' Compare also Stirm, p. 200, Hettinger, pp. 512, etc., and Nicolas ii. 12, etc.; who, among other testimonies, cites the emphatic expressions of Madame de Sevigné to her daughter in which, in spite of the happiness which her life and talents afforded her, she complains of the sorrows of life, and still more of death, and continues: ‘and I find death so terrible that I hate life still more because it leads thereto, than because it is sown with thorns. You will say to me-would I then like to live always? Certainly not! On the contrary, if my opinion had been asked, I would rather have died in my nurse's arms.'

(10) Seneca, De ira iii. 26; compare ii. 9 and 27; De benef, i. 10. Compare Lüken, pp. 403–405.

(11) Even Bayle asks (Article Manichéens): 'why were not the heathen able to say something more sensible about it? It is only by means of revelation that we can get over this difficulty.' Nicolas ii. 24.

(12) Comp. Lüken, Die Traditionen des Menschengeschlechts, p. 74.

(13) Very instructive, in this matter, is what we read of the life of Perthes (Perthes Leben, i. 60, etc.), who himself passed through the various phases of progress, from Kant to Schiller, and thence to Christian truth.