"_Neither shalt thou countenance a poor man in his own cause_." These are specimens of Bible morality! He alone is the blasphemer who attributes such vicious and malevolent orders to the supreme power. The Christian, in their presumptuous and unwarrantable assertions, assume that the science of ethics is comparatively of modern date, and that the personage called Jesus Christ was the first who taught that pure morality and virtue constituted the summum bonum of human happiness; and that all morality owes its existence to their gospels; and that all ethical goodness to be found out of Christendom, is entirely attributable to their Scriptures. But nothing can be farther from the truth than this evangelical detraction, with its inexorable disregard to facts. Fortunately for the calumniated cause of Paganism, we have data, chronological and historical, to show that the science of ethics was not only perfectly known to the ancients, but that the few really good things which are to be found in the New Testament, were borrowed from what is called "the divine philosophy of the ancients;" or the moral maxims of Pythagoras, Thales, Solon, Bias, Pittacus, Chilo, Cleobulus, Periander, and many others, who lived full 500 years before the Christian era. This is so demonstrably true, that the sayings of these men are in some instances copied into the New Testament almost word for word; but for the maxims of that book which are either bad or questionable (and these are not a few), there is no authority to be found in the ancients cited. The compilers of the above book have also drawn literally from the moral maxims of Confucius,* who, according to some writers, has been held in great esteem in China for about 4,000 years, but all agree that he lived at least 550 before our era. * As names in eastern languages are expressive of some attribute or quality adherent to the possessor; so Confucius signifies a speaker of wisdom.