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PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM.

and Seneca, contemporary with Paul, writes to his friend Lucilius :

"Glory is the shadow of virtue ; it will accompany even those who desire it not. But as shadows sometimes precede and sometimes follow, so our renown is sometimes before us, and offers itself to cur sight; and sometimes it is turned from us; but the later it is, the greater it is, when envy has died away. . . . Look at Epicurus, whom not only the learned, but the ignorant multitude, admire. This man was unknown in the very city of Athens where he hid. Survivor of Metrodorus by many years, in a letter in which he celebrates their mutual friendship with grateful remembrance, he adds at last that, possessed of such goods, it was no injury to Metrodorus and himself that the nobles of Greece not only ignored, but scarcely knew them by report. . . . Metrodorus also confesses in one of his letters that he and Epicurus had not the distinction they deserved; but afterward adds, that a great name was in store for them with those who were willing to follow in their steps. No virtue can remain concealed; or if concealed, it is not virtue's loss (nulla latet virtus, et latuisse non ipsius est damnum).”

It is not very likely that new discoveries will throw new light on the man whose personality has proved such a power in the world, whose characteristic idea yet lives, and has representatives still, although the school and the confession are long since extinct. We have all the materials we are likely to have for forming our judgment of his character and life. What shall the verdict be? I

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coeval with the earth's duration. We are safe in pronouncing it the first of didactic poems. It is one of the very few of that class which have won for themselves an enduring fame. Pope's Essay on Man" is the nearest approach to it in that kind. And this is the only fruit that has reached us from that Epicurean garden, the only product that remains of a school which in point of popularity occupied the foremost place among the philosophic systems of antiquity and filled the classic world with its fame.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EPICURUS.

In my characterization of Epicurus I spoke of the poverty of his intellectual culture, and noticed the want in him both of the intuitive and the analytic faculty. For speculative inquiry, for discoveries in the realm of thought, he had no aptitude; but for practical philosophy a very decided, inborn vocation. Philosophy for him was a rule of life — ἐνέργεια τὸν εὐδαίμονα βίον περιποιοῦσα. He sought in it precisely what Socrates had taught men to seek in it, practical well-being. Especially he sought in it freedom, the freedom which Athens, deprived of her autonomy, and tending to political downfall, no longer enjoyed. He sought emancipation from the yoke of superstition.