[308] Sed pietate ac religione, atque hac una sapientia, quod deorum immortalium numine omnia regi gubernarique perspeximus, omnes gentes nationesque superavimus. Cic. de. Harus. resp. p. 189. [309] Quis est qui——cum deos esse intellexerit, non intelligat eorum numine hoc tantum imperium esse natum, et auctum et retentum. Ibid. p. 188. [310] Cari sunt parentes, cari liberi, propinqui et familiares: sed omnes omnium caritates patria una complexa est. Cic. de Offic. [311] Pro qua patria, mori, et cui nos totos dedere, et in qua nostra omnia ponere, et quasi consecrare debemus. Cic. de Leg. [312] That the fundamental principles of the stoicks tended to atheism I readily grant: but as the real philosophers of that sect inculcated a thorough contempt for what are called the good things of this life, and were extremely austere in their morals; their doctrines seem to have had a very different influence upon the manners of the people wherever they were received, from those of the Epicureans.—Brutus and Cato the inflexible champions of liberty, and almost the only virtuous characters in that corrupt period, were rigid stoicks.—Julius Cæsar who subverted the constitution of his country, was a thorough Epicurean, both in principle and practice. His principles we plainly see in his sophistical speech in Sallust, where he urges the total extinction of our being at death, as an argument for sparing the lives of Cataline’s accomplices. For he audaciously affirms to the senate:—“that death as a punishment was so far from being an evil; that it released us from all our sorrows, when labouring under distress and misery: that it put a final period to all the evils of this life, beyond which there was no longer room either for grief or joy.” Thus as the learned Dr. Warburton justly remarks, “he took occasion, with a licentiousness until then unknown to that august assembly, to explain and enforce the avowed principles of Epicurus (of whose sect he was) concerning _the mortality of the soul_.” Divine legation part 2d. pages, 111, 112, last edition. That his manners were notoriously infamous we may learn from the history of his life in Suetonius, where he is termed _the husband of every woman, and the wife of every man_. Omnium mulierum virum, et omnium virorum mulierem. Sueton. in vit. Jul. Cæsar, c. 52. ad finem. [313] I here mean the tenets of the _Epicurean atheists_ as they are termed by the very learned Mr. Baxter in his treatise of the immortality of the soul; where he has confuted them at large in the first volume of that admirable work. Inquiry into the nature of the human soul. Vol. 1. p. 355.