The ambition of the ancients was encouraged by the conviction that life is worth living, and that all its social and intellectual summits can be reached by the persistent pursuit of a well-chosen road. But the basis of that confidence was undermined by a doctrine which denied the value of earthly existence, and made the renunciation of worldly blessings the chief purpose of moral education. The pilgrim of life who had been taught to spurn earth as a vale of tears, and turn his hopes to the promises of another world, was not apt to trouble himself about a consistent plan of secular pursuits, which, moreover, he had been distinctly instructed to trust to the chances of the current day: “Take no thought for the morrow;” “Take no thought for your life, nor yet for your body ... for after all these things do the gentiles seek.” Indecision, inconsistency, fickleness of purpose, vitiated the politics of the Christian nations through-out the long chaos of the Middle Ages, and in their features of individual character there is a strange want of that moral unity and harmony which the consciousness of an attainable purpose gave to the national exemplars of an earlier age. The Rationalistic reaction of the last two centuries has greatly modified the moral ideals of the Caucasian nations; the legitimacy of secular pursuits is more generally recognized, but still only in a furtive, hesitating manner, and the glaring contrast of our daily practice with the theories of a still prevalent system of ethics cannot fail to involve contradictions incompatible with true consistency of principles and action. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT. For thirteen hundred years the importance of perseverance in the pursuit of earthly aims was depreciated by the ethics of Antinaturalism, and the word Failure is written in glaring letters over the record of the physical, mental, and moral enterprises of all that period. The nations of northern Europe, whom the prestige of Rome surrendered to the power of popish priests, were giants in stature and strength, and the love of physical health was too deeply rooted in the hereditary constitution of those athletes to be at once eradicated by the machinations of spiritual poison-mongers. Yet the poison did not fail to assert its virulence. Athletic sports were still a favorite pastime of all freemen; but the gospel of the Nature-hating Galilean insisted on the antagonism of physical and moral welfare; penances and the worship of cadaverous saints perverted the manlier ideals of the masses, the encouragement of ascetic habits and the enforced inactivity of convent life undermined the stamina of the noblest nations, and in the course of a few orthodox generations the descendants of the herculean hunter-tribes of northern Europe became a prey to a multitude of malignant diseases.