the seat of empire, or travelling like wandering stars over her vast territory, but these scattered, nebular, and disjointed luminaries shone with a varying as well as a feeble light, which rather confused than satisfied human reason. They were utterly powerless to transfer their doctrine into any number of human hearts living in accordance therein. The only exception to this statement seems to prove its real truth. By far the most united of the sects was that of the Epicureans, who held with great tenacity to their founder’s views and mode of life, which may be summed up in denial of God and Providence, and enjoyment to the utmost of this world’s goods; the fair side of it being a general benevolence, courtesy, friendship, in short, a genial appreciation of what we understand by the word civilisation. These antagonists of Stoic principles and of the highest morality which heathen thought had constructed were the most numerous of existing sects, and we are told that hundreds of years after their founder’s death they presented the appearance of a well-ordered republic, ruled without uproar or dissension by one spirit, in which they formed a favourable contrast to the Stoics. With the exception of a single fugitive, Metrodorus, never had an Epicurean detached himself from his school.(471) We must give philosophy the credit of this single instance of a capacity to create a social life in accordance with its tenets in a sect whose doctrines were a reproach among the heathens themselves. The failure of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zeno, was the success of Epicurus, and at the same time the announcement that the age of Augustus and Tiberius was ready to expire in sensuality and unbelief, and even in exhaustion of the philosophic mind, for no period is so barren of scientific names, which carry any weight, as the fifty years preceding Claudius.(472) We have seen above that all these philosophers aimed at forming a society which should carry out their principles; that this was their original and their only idea of teaching; that with a view to make it permanent they created a chair of teaching, a living authority who was to continue on their doctrine. But the chair of Plato alone presented(473) five Academies with dissentient doctrines; and a Platonic or Stoic city no one had seen. Thus viewing their united action upon the polytheistic idolatry we may say that while they could discredit its fables in reflecting minds, while they could even raise an altar in their thoughts “to the unknown God,” they left society in possession of the temples and observant of a worship which they pronounced to be immoral, monstrous, and ridiculous. They had destroyed in many the ancestral belief; they had awakened perhaps in some a sense of one great Power ruling the universe; but having taken up the religious ground and professed to satisfy man’s desire for happiness, they had been utterly powerless to construct a religion.