girt energy for the sake of which all faculty exists. Tried by this test, Plato will stand out a king of philosophers; superior, in some respects unquestionably, even to that stern and hard, cool, resolute, concise, and Wellingtonian Aristotle, whose famous principle of the golden mean in morals, recommends itself to our practical British intellect above all others, because it is the most useful in practice. Notwithstanding the pleasure which, as a genuine Greek, Plato always displays in the slippery gymnastics of a puzzling dialectic, a quality of mind which makes some of his dialogues not a little annoying to the broad, direct, and unrefining mind of the Englishman—the soul of his philosophy lies in morals, as every one must feel who will breathe for some time with serious sympathy the atmosphere of his works. In this respect there is nothing more striking than to compare the serious moral tone that winds up some of his dialogues with the chain of moral maxims, with which St. Paul generally concludes his doctrinal epistles. After eleven chapters of somewhat perplexed and puzzling argumentation, the great apostle-to take one example from many-proceeds, in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, to discharge a whole battery of the most important practical admonitions, as if eager to make it manifest to his readers that all argumentative theology is a necessary evil, which one must accept only as a traveller does a long dark tunnel, through which it is necessary that he should pass before he can emerge into the freedom of a broad and smiling landscape. In the same way the Gorgias of Plato-a dialogue which commences with a dialectical dissection of the idea of eloquence, annoying the British sense not a little with the seeming studied determination of Socrates not to see the plain truth when it stands before him, unless he can see it rigidly, according to the links of a strictly logical process-this ostensibly rhetorical Gorgias is led step by step into a purely moral vein of such sublime seriousness, that the most reputable modern reader, according to the maxims of worldly morality stands convicted before it, feeling much as Felix did when he trembled before St. Paul's lofty argument of temperance, and of righteousness, and of judgment to come. One feels the difference here between Plato the preacher of righteousness delivering his soul of a heavy moral burden, and that army of light-winged

skirmishers, called Sophists, making a twinkling display of their wordy accomplishments, whom, nevertheless, as already mentioned, a recent notable historian of Greece in this country has thought worthy of placing under the ægis of his most special championship. Between the Sophists and Socrates there was just this very important difference, that to them the wisdom of words was often everything, while to Socrates and Plato, as many distinct passages testify, it was nothing. The Sophists, as a class, were men to whom intellectual display and mere verbal dexterity sufficed for the creditable exercise of their vocation. To Plato, though himself the most eloquent of writers, such accomplishments without truthfulness, sincerity, seriousness, and a high purpose in life, were of no greater value than they were afterwards to St. Paul. To a man who is in thorough earnest to reform, first his own moral nature and then the social world around him, the mere act of talking, to whatever height carried, will always appear a very flimsy affair.

There is one essentially Greek trait about the Socratic and Platonic morality (for they are fundamentally the same)1 which deserves special mention. With Socrates, as with Solomon, virtue and wisdom are identical; and all vice is either stupidity, disease, or madness. It has been said that the way to a woman's head is through her heart, and the way to her heart through her children. In the same way it may be said that the way to a Greek's heart in Plato's day was through his head, and the way to his head through dialectics. It was in the doctrine of intellectual ideas, and in purely rational sciences, such as mathematics and arithmetic, that Plato found the Toû σT@ of his whole philosophy of personal and social reform; here was the training-school that redeemed a man from the slavery of sense, and brought

1 The comparison between the Socrates of Xenophon and that of Plato is well made, and their substantial identity proved by ZELLER, in his Geschichte der Griechischen Philosophie, a book which I have read with great care, and can conscientiously recommend to all students.

2 In proof of this the Philebus may specially be noted, and the high position which in that most important dialogue is assigned to the ró pove, intellectual insight, above every sort of dový, or pleasurable emotion. The sentimental and mystic persons, sometimes called Platonic in modern times, could hardly be made to digest this.

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him up by due degrees to the capacity of receiving the most elevated, the most comprehensive, and the least personal of all ideas—viz. justice. This method, we need scarcely state, is not to be found in the New Testament. There is no idea more foreign to the Gospel of Jesus Christ than that of leading to holiness through a syllogism. The New Testament goes direct to the deep fountain of all passion and action in the emotional nature of man. It breaks, by the mere assertion of the moral nature in man, the icy crust of self-righteousness which keeps the self-contained heart from being stirred by the breath of divine love; by the moral contagion of a superior nature it rouses the sleeping power of self-condemnation, the necessary postulate of a holy life; and commences violently a process of self-purification and regeneration, under the highly potentiated influences of the Divine Spirit. Now, there is nothing of the Socratic dialectic process in all this and yet how potently the evangelic method works the moral history of nearly two thousand years can recount. In effecting moral reforms of great masses of men, the method of moral contagion will always be the most efficacious; but the method of the dialectic exhibition of the utter futility of unrighteousness before practical reason is not, therefore, to be considered useless, even under the Christian dispensation. There are some minds whom a fiery Whitfield may cause to feel uncomfortable for a moment, but he will not convert them. They have too much intellectual stoutness to be conquered by anything but hard logic; and to such minds it is necessary that Plato, and the Greeks, and Sir William Hamilton, should preach. The recognition of the importance of this intellectual avenue to the moral nature of man will show the significance of that question, which occupies such a prominent place in some Platonic dialogues, IS VIRTUE TEACHABLE? To us, who are continually employing the vast machinery of the Christian pulpit for the purpose of teaching it, the question seems a very idle one; but to the Greeks, who had no church of recognized authority, and among whom a mighty host of self-constituted teachers-the Sophists-had arisen, professing to teach not only eloquence, but wisdom and virtue, and making a livelihood by this profession, a more interesting question could not have been raised. On this

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subject, though in the Protagoras the matter is left undecided, there cannot be the slightest doubt what the real opinion of Plato and his master was. On the one hand, when the Sophist made loud pretensions of teaching virtue in so many lessons for so many drachms per lesson, just as a druggist might teach any man how to compound a medicine by taking certain proportions of certain given articles and triturating them all together, Socrates might well deny that virtue was teachable in this way, or that justice and temperance can be instilled into a man's soul as wine can be sent down his throat by the transference of liquor from the wine-merchant's cask, and of pence from the wine-consumer's pocket. But, on the other hand, whatever may be the tongue-fence of individual dialogues, it is indubitably plain that Socrates, who in Xenophon identifies virtue with opóvnois, and Plato, with whom in the Republic and elsewhere the same opóvnois, or insight, leads the van of all the virtues, could have held no other doctrine than that virtue is teachable, when taught in the right way-that is, from the commanding point of a great central principle, like the principle of faith in the New Testament, and the doctrine of eternal, innate God-generated ideas in the Platonic system. If virtue were, like poetry, not teachable—that is, capable of exposition by scientific reasons, why did Socrates and Plato spend their long and valuable lives in teaching it?

But the grand characteristic and essentially evangelic trait of the Platonic morality is its lofty supersensualism, or what we may, by a more familiar name, call unworldliness. In this respect it will be greeted at once with joy by every true Christian as full sister to the never-sufficiently to be venerated system of ethics, of which the most perfect type stands before us in the sermon on the Mount, and in the life of Christ. I said before, and I repeat it here, that the study of Plato is no mere headwork. It is a severe purification of the whole heart and life, or it is nothing at all. The apostle of the Academy is not a whit behind the disciple of Gamaliel in the demands which he makes for a regeneration, and a renovation, and a complete reconstruction of the whole fabric of human life, so far as that is based on a morality of mere customary and conventional respectabilities.

"Be not conformed to this world!" is a sentence as frequent and as seriously meant in Plato as in St. Paul. In fact, there is in the world always a respectable sort of surface moralityand nowhere more than in this British world at the present hour -a morality of convenience and utility, which pays respect to the principles of right and wrong when generally formalized, but which recognizes them practically only in so far as local customs and decencies, proprieties, etiquettes, and the round of certain "inevitable charities" are willing to recognize them. With this morality the popular Greek Sophist in Plato's day was perfectly contented; he professed, indeed, in the very words of his highest eulogist Mr. Grote, no other virtue; and this morality, also, many a consumer of beef-steaks and swiller of porter in this lusty and material land accepts even now, after eighteen hundred years of Gospel preaching, as quite sufficient for all the purposes of a respectable English life. But how poor a thing it is, Plato in many places shows with a calm Titanic power that has never been excelled; and the perverse maxims and vicious practices with which our British society is rank, make it evident to the most superficial glance how far the current morality of our trades and parties is from seeking to accommodate itself to the principles of extreme moral purity laid down in every page of the New Testament. A sermon may be a very proper thing as Sunday work, and may help to bridge the way to heaven, when a bridge shall be required; but on Monday a man must attend to his business, and act according to the maxims of his trade, of his party, of his corporation, of his vestry. Then the respectable turf-hunter will stake his last thousand on the leg of a racing-horse, and think it quite like a Christian gentleman to allow his tailor's bill to lie unpaid for another year; then the respectable Highland proprietor will refuse to renew the lease to the industrious. poor cottar on his estate, that the people, for whom he cares. nothing, may make way for the red deer, whom it is his only passion to stalk; then the respectable brewer, instead of preparing wholesome drink from wholesome grain, will infect his brewst with deleterious drugs in order to excite a factitious thirst in the stomach of his consumers, and increase the amount of drinking; then a respectable corporation, to main