It is an old and obvious fancy, that of dividing the inner life into a series of steps, or of describing it in the allegorical form of a pilgrimage with its various stages and halts and hindrances of one sort or another. Yet I do not know of any such description that suits the needs of our own day, especially the needs of people of culture; indeed, it is, and has ever been, a fault of most sermons that while they depict life’s attainable ideal with more or less exactness, they are noways able to give as plain an account of the way thither. Yet this is just the service (and the directions should be quite specific, too) which the church, it would seem, is called upon to perform for the present generation. What is known by the somewhat distasteful name of “the cure of souls,” so far as it exists at all, has become too professional (not to say too commercial) a matter with the churches: in the things of the spirit there is nothing if not freedom and individuality; yet it is just here that a kind of rigid technical nomenclature has been devised, with expressions that once may have been justified, but are now meaningless to many men and at some future time will have to be replaced, perhaps, by others. Of the writings we possess on the unfolding of the inner life by steps, only one has come down to us from classical times; this is an essay of Plutarch, the Greek professor of philosophy (as we should now call him), who was born at Chæronea in Bœotia about 50 A.D., and died between 120 and 130 A.D. at Rome, where, among other things, he is said to have been the teacher of the future emperor Hadrian. Of his hundred and more writings, some shorter, some longer, the “Parallel Lives” are now almost the only ones read, and even these are less read in the schools than is perhaps proper. Of the rest, which are usually comprised under the general title of “Plutarch’s Ethical Writings,” one of the most readable is that dedicated to Sosius Senecio, consul under Trajan,--“How One may be Conscious of his Progress in Goodness.” On the whole, it exhibits the Eclectic view (in the sense of Ciceronian Eclecticism) as contrasted with the teachings of the Stoics, who only recognize the perfect wise man who observes their principles, on the one hand, and on the other, the man addicted to vice, without intervening transitional grades. In this treatise, as each reader will at once notice, there is a special lack of the depth which first came into morals through Christianity (then but little known as yet), and which will always come into morals only by that path; but it possesses in considerable degree a sound and natural human good sense, which is directed toward the nobler things of life, and whose development in youthful temperaments is an indispensable purpose in so-called classical culture.