Motives of political prudence induced the law-givers of the Mediterranean nations to circumscribe the authority of their pontiffs, which at last was, indeed, almost limited to the supervision of religious ceremonies. But in Rome, as well as in Greece and the Grecian colonies of western Asia, the true functions of priesthood were assumed by the popular exponents of philosophy, especially by the Stoics and Pythagoreans. The weekly lectures of Zeno were attended by a miscellaneous throng of truth-seekers; the disciples of Pythagoras almost worshiped their master; Diagoras and Carneades traveled from town to town, preaching to vast audiences of spell-bound admirers; Apollonius of Tyana rose in fame till cities competed for the honor of his visits; the clientèle of no Grecian prince was thought complete without a court philosopher; the tyrant Dionysius, in all the pride of his power, invited the moral rigorist Plato and submitted to his daily repeated reproofs. Philosophers were the confessors, the comforters, and the counselors of their patrons, and philosophic tutors were in such request that wealthy Romans did not hesitate to procure them from the traffickers in Grecian captives and indulge them in all privileges but that of liberty. Centuries before a bishop of Rome contrived to avert the wrath of King Alaric, doomed cities had been spared at the intercession of pagan philosophers, and philosophers more than once succeeded in allaying the fury of mutineers who would have ridiculed an appeal to mythological traditions. B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY. The power of filial love hardly exceeds that of the passionate veneration which kindles about the person of a sincere teacher of truth. The homage paid to an apostle of light is the noblest form of hero-worship. The hosannas of idol-service overflowing upon the idol-priest are marred by the discords of hypocrisy and the reproving silence of reason; but the approval of wisdom is the highest reward of its ministry. The brightness of that prestige shames the gilded halo of the mythology-monger; the minister of Truth may lack the pomp of consecrated temples, but his disciples will make a hermit’s cave a Delphic grotto and will not willingly let the record of his oracles perish. The chants of the Eleusynian festivals, the shout of the Lupercalia, the mumblings of augurs and sibyls, have been forever silenced; but the words of Plato still live; Socrates still speaks to thousands of truth-seekers; the wisdom of Seneca still brightens the gloom of adversity. Religions founded on any basis of truth can survive the fall of their temples. Jerusalem was wrecked in the storm of Roman conquest, but the health-laws of the Mosaic code defied the power of the destroyer, and of all the creeds born on the teeming soil of the East, Judaism alone can still be preached without an alloy of cant and compromise.