to God, constructed no system of ethics in dependence on that conception, which, if it be true, is of all-constraining influence, and is to the whole moral system what the law of gravity is to the material universe. Plato’s ethical system was a strict deduction from his physical theory of the three parts in man, to each of which he assigned its virtue. Far less did Aristotle connect morality with God. The Stoics, indeed, who occupy by far the largest space in Greek philosophy, seem to be an exception. It is said that “their whole view of the world springs from the thought of the Divine Being who generates all finite beings from himself, and includes them all in himself, who penetrates them with his power, rules them with his unchangeable law, and thus merely manifests himself in them all;” so that their system “is fundamentally religious, and scarcely an important statement in it which is not in connection with their doctrine of God;” and so with them “all moral duties rest on a religious ground, all virtuous actions are a fulfilment of the divine will and law;”(458) but then this God is but a name for the sternest and most absolute system of material necessity: a God without a moral nature; without freedom; without personality; under that name, in fact, force and matter making up one thing are substituted for a living God, who, in virtue of the laws of nature, is swept out of his own universe. So, again, Cicero’s statement that man’s happiness consists in virtue, which virtue is life according to nature, is the general doctrine of philosophy, which the Stoics in particular had elaborated. If there be any one expression which would sum-up in a point the whole heathen conception of what man should do, it would be “Life according to nature.” So, again, the exclusion of any thought of immortality, and a consequent retribution, in its bearing on morality, was common to all the schools of Grecian thought, if we except the faltering accents and yearning heart of Plato, and most of all was truly stoic. The imperfection and unclearness of their view as to the divine personality, and as to the human, in the reasonable being, the image and reflection of the divine, accords but too truly, while it accounts for, this detachment of man from God in the field of moral duty.