no difficulty in doing his duty, when he once saw it plainly before him, might well say with Socrates and with Plato, that virtue was knowledge, that right living was a science, and that therefore a high education was the necessary condition of a noble character. This attitude is foreign to the morals of Christianity, which accepts the child and the ignorant as better fitted for salvation than the wise and prudent. But such a theory, like that of a primitive Church where the members had all things in common, may be very practical at the opening of a revolution, yet may afterwards be found impracticable. It was not merely owing to its supposed corruption and decadence that the Mediæval Church came to ignore that poverty and equality of all Christians which we find at Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles. There is an aristocracy among men which no system of religion, of morals, of politics can ignore without disastrous consequences, and that is the aristocracy of intellect. This was the lesson which Plato taught in every page, and this it was which made him speculate upon the nature of the soul, and its relation to the Author of the universe, and to the knowledge of things higher and deeper than mere ordinary experience. It was only gradually that he arrived at his conviction of the immortality, or rather of the eternity of the soul; probably it was suggested to him by the mystics and theologians among the Greeks. But in his dialogue known as the _Phædo_, he has discussed this now accepted belief with all its difficulties. In the person of Socrates, he has courted all the objections, and has endeavoured to show on metaphysical principles that the soul, being a perfectly simple active principle, distinct from, and superior to, the body, will not pass away with the death of its tabernacle but will exist hereafter, as it has existed, from eternity to eternity. The late Erwin Rohde, a critic not at all favourable to revealed religion, says, I think with great truth, that “no human teacher has ever done so much as Plato to extend this belief,” which has produced not only the noblest spiritual life, but also the noblest poetry. You know it in your English poets, best of all perhaps in the sober Wordsworth-- Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. And again: Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And hear the children sporting on the shore, And hear the mighty waves, rolling for evermore.