as impossible.[22] Hence Augustine will believe first, postponing the grave question whether belief is likely to be supported by proof.[23] Hence that conception of saintliness which the world owes to Catholic Christianity, a type of character which, while maintaining a marvellous purity of life, is devoid of that robust intelligence without which purity runs into asceticism; which carries virtue to such an extravagant pitch that its results may be more disastrous than those of extravagant vice, inasmuch as the latter may serve morality by demonstrating the repulsiveness of iniquity, while the former tends to evil by exhibiting the impossibility of goodness.[24] This “_extravagance du christianisme_”[25] is, of course, utterly at variance with the general character of the efforts by which either a Greek or a Roman directed his steps in the ways of goodness. Neither Aristotle nor Horace, neither Plato nor Seneca, would have admitted many of the most lauded virtues of modern ethical systems to be virtues at all. Least of all would they have hailed as a virtue that passionate excess of enthusiasm which makes Virtue independent of Reason, and greets intellectual impossibilities as the trials and tests of the “virtue” of Belief.[26] Speaking in a general sense, and with a tacit recognition of certain exceptions to be noticed in their proper place, it may be premised that Pagan goodness of character found its inspiration, not in any kind of emotional enthusiasm, but in methods of thought and action selected and controlled by the operation of reason and intelligence.[27] Horace’s opinion respecting the viciousness of the man who indulges in a too excessive love of virtue is the opinion, if not of a Greek, at any rate of a Roman who is saturated with Greek philosophy;[28] but the early character of the poet’s countrymen, as evinced not less in their Religion than in their general outlook on life, is as little disposed to extravagance as the strongest advocate of _aurea mediocritas_ could well desire. Roman Religion, influenced to some extent as it was by the gloomy terrors of Etruscan superstition, found its value and its meaning, from the gods of the Indigitamenta downwards, in the fact that it was an appeal to the intelligence of the citizen. That this appeal operated in a narrow sphere of duties and was not unaffected by mean and sordid considerations does not militate against its general character as an address to the reason rather than an invocation to the passions. Ancient critics found for the word “_Religio_” a derivation which pointed to carefulness and regularity as qualities inherent in its essential meaning;[29] and that avoidance of disordered excess, which tends to compromise, was as conspicuous in early Roman religious practice as it was in the sternest of Greek philosophies when transplanted to Roman soil, and interpenetrated with the Roman character.[30] This spirit of compromise was based upon a recognition that the actual demands of