a chapter on human piety, or rather a pervading soul of human piety, without which all other chapters want their highest inspiration. And in this view the Aristotelian author of the “_Magna Moralia_” is wrong in blaming Plato for mingling up the doctrine of Virtue with discussions on the Absolute Good--that is, God. It is important to inquire what was the cause of this defect. That the subject was not altogether ignored by our philosopher is plain from the single sentence of allusion in Book viii. 12. 5; and, indeed, that a man of such reach of intellect should by mere accident or carelessness have omitted such an important factor in all moral calculations {187} seems in the highest degree improbable; but so far is the idea of God from giving any colour to his system of Moral Philosophy, that the very occurrence of the phrase, θεραπεύειν τὸν θεόν, in the last section of the Eudemian Ethics, has been justly adduced by Grant among the many proofs of the inauthenticity of that treatise. That Aristotle was a theist is certain, both from other places of his voluminous writings, and specially from a famous passage in the _Metaphysics_ which has lately been brought forward with due prominence by the noble-minded Bunsen in his great work, _God in History_; it seems impossible, indeed, for such a profound thinker as Aristotle to be an atheist, because, as Schleiermacher well remarks, “Philosophy cannot inquire into the totality of things, without at the same time inquiring into their unity, and as the totality of things is the world, so the unity of things is God;” or, as Spinoza has it in one of his propositions--“_Quicquid est in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo neque esse neque concipi potest_.” But it is one thing to be a theist as a matter of speculative belief, and another thing to be a man of devout temper and pious practice. And herein, if I mistake not, lies the real cause of the defect in the Ethics now under consideration. For if Aristotle had been a man of any fervour of religious sentiment, he had two courses before him with regard to the Greek religion, neither of which he has followed--he might either, like his great master Plato, or Xenophanes of Colophon among the pre-Socratic thinkers, have attacked the Homeric theology, and shown how its general tendency and some of its most distinctive features were inconsistent with a pure and elevated morality, or, like Socrates, {188} Xenophon, Pindar, Æschylus, Plutarch, and many other far-sighted and large-hearted men, he might have taken Jove as the impersonated Providence of Hellenic piety, and, allowing the immoral deities quietly to drop, shown how all the highest qualities of the moral nature of man are collected and concentrated in the supreme sovereign of gods and men. In the one case, he would have shown his zeal for true religion by his zealous iconoclasm of false gods; in the other case, he might have shown a still nobler form of piety by his