Not only, like the son of Tydeus, ought that luminary to come forth, with glory blazing round it, and kindling admiration, as well as emulous delight, in the outward world, but his beauty must specially pervade within, and transfigure every secret impulse with the splendors of his imparted Godhead. Such a divine need was generally felt, and this was the cause of that high estimation in the common mind which the devout moralists enjoyed. Homer inculcated the idea that life is a contest; and Plato directed his hearers to the search after unity as the source of truth and beauty; Æschylus to power; Euripides to the law of expiation. The contempt of life and pleasure, the superiority of the intellectual over the physical nature, are expressed by these and kindred writers in great thoughts which are almost identical with the light of faith. Heraclitus taught Hesiod, Pythagoras, Zenophanes, and Hecateus, that the sole wisdom consists in knowing the will according to which all things in the world are governed. Marsilius Ficinus says that Socrates was raised up by heaven to pacify minds; and St. John Chrysostom proposes him as an example of Christian poverty and monastic profession. St. Augustine entertained equal admiration for one who preferred eternal to temporal things, fearing to act unjustly more than death, and for conscience sake was ready to undergo labor, penury, insult, and death. In the Enthypro of Platonician wisdom, Socrates disengages ideas from words; in the Apology, he shows that the wisest are the most humble, and that we must bear our witness to truth, even at the risk of our lives; in the Laws, that the soul has need of a celestial light to be able to see; in the Crito, that the least duty is to be preferred to the greatest advantage; in the Phædo, that life should be employed in elevating the soul--that there is a future existence--and that the soul should be disengaged from the body; in the Theætetus, that, the germ of truth resides in all men, but that no individual has the full measure of truth; in the Gorgias, that it is better to suffer than to commit injustice; that it is useful to the soul to be chastised, and that he who suffers punishment is delivered from the evil of his soul; in the Euthydemus, that the science of the Sophists is empty and vain; in the second Alcibiades, that it is better to be ignorant than to have false knowledge; in the Theages, that the only true wisdom is love; in the Phædrus, that it is love, or, as Socrates defines it, the desire of something that is wanting, which gives wings to the soul, and enables it to mount to heaven; in the Meno, that virtue is the gift of God, not of nature, but an infusion by a divine influence; in the Banquet, that love leads us to contemplate the supreme beauty, the universal type, the Creator, from which vision we derive virtue and immortality. In view of such focal beamings at the heart of pagan night, we need not wonder that Thomas of Villanova