with God and angels and the spirits of just men made perfect, is, in a selfish point of view, preferable to life.

As to the spotless purity and thorough searchingness of the future judgment portrayed in the Bible, nothing can be more solemn or more grand. In that day the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed and every man shall receive according to his works as indicating his disposition and habit of mind and heart. The award was threefold in the Socratic belief, everlasting, purgatorial, blissful.

The Bible contemplates a twofold award. The righteous shall go into eternal happiness and the wicked into eternal misery. It knows nothing of a purgatorial state after death. As to the duration of either of these eternal states the Scriptures give no limit: but, rather, there is in their language much ground for the opinion, which some have not hesitated to express, that eternity is a term descriptive of a state, an epoch or a dispensation, rather than of duration or any other idea that has reference to time.

If never-ending torture is threatened for the wicked, either in the writings of Socrates or Scripture, this may, possibly, be of use as terrifying some from vice who otherwise would perpetrate it: but it is a hopeless effort, to attempt to prove by reason the excellence of such a doctrine, for it appears irreconcilable with the idea of Divine mercy, inasmuch as we cannot even conceive any good purpose which would be attainable by the ceaseless torture of the sorrowing culprit when the righteous will be, by the hypothesis, beyond danger of imitating his guilt,

and the unrighteous, too, will be past the power of being benefitted by the warning of his example. In this respect then we regard the Bible as being at least on a par with the belief of Socrates.

Thus the Bible furnishes us with religious instructions and hopes which are, without doubt, wholly equal, if they are not in many respects superior to, the brightest excellences in the religion of Socrates.

C.-ARGUMENT FOR THE HIGH AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE FROM ITS HAVING EXCELLENCES WHICH CONTRAST WITH THE FAULTS EVEN OF A SOCRATES.

OUR investigation now forces on us the painful task of inquiring after some of the observable faults in the Academic system and then presenting, in contrast with these, a few of those excellences in the religion of the Bible to which we have not yet drawn attention.

In reading Plato's Republic we are surprised to find that all poetry would have been excluded from the idea of human and social perfection by that Socrates who made such frequent use of quotations from the poems extant in his day, and who, in all but the rhythm of metre, was himself a poet full of exquisite imaginations and writing with the sweetest melody of diction. Yet so it is, Socrates would have annihilated poetry in order to develop man. We take exception to this on two grounds: first, inasmuch as we believe poetry and its gentle loving ways, or its wild stirring emotions, to be as influential in the refinement and elevation of the

human soul as any instrument which can be used in education. Who, that knows Homer or Eschylus or Horace or Juvenal, has not learned from them thoughts and truths which have come home to his inner man with a force unparalleled by any other and which has made their lines of feeling or of wisdom to be engrafted as a portion of our very selves? Expel the writings of Chaucer, Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens and Thackeray from our English literature and who, that has studied these writings, does not know that we should be losing that which is an inestimable advantage to the populace hardly less than to the élite? Yet no poet-that is no writer of fiction would Socrates have tolerated in his model Republic. Let him, who can imagine what the Bible, without its parables, without the psalms, without the best chapters of Isaiah, and without its other poetical portions would be—let such an one say whether the forbidding of poets and poetry was not a grievous fault in the Academic system: but we take exception to this maxim of Socrates still farther, on the ground that it necessarily implies a narrow and most illiberal conception of humanity. It implies no less than a censorship of the press and a mutilation of man's faculties. God has given to his creature imagination and taste which is capable of delighting in the products of imagination : but, forsooth, we must emasculate ourselves, at least, as far as a taste for poetry is concerned. This is a notion surely unworthy of philosophy which teaches us that every passion, every affection, every faculty and every sense, has its

proper object and that, each being duly and proportionately exercised in accordance with reason and in subordination to conscience, we may delight ourselves in the gratifications alike of sense, and mind, and spirit, while we happily and with thankfulness remember that God "has given us all things freely to enjoy." Here is what we regard as a fault in Socrates. There is no parallel to it in the Bible where poetry and fiction, often of the highest class, abound; and one of whose generous, large-hearted maxims we have but just quoted as summing up the grateful and pious decision of philosophy's broad mind.

Another fault we grieve to find in the good old Socrates is that whatever may have been the clear belief of his own intellect-however he may have seen and sometimes spoken of the absurdities of Polytheism till he was entangled in the charge of Atheism-however he may himself have adored one great and ever present Deity—he yet dallied with the idolatry and Polytheism of his day. Not only did he allow that, for the multitude, there was piety in worshipping gods many and lords many but the last act of his death-scene shows what a hold the educational prejudices of superstition still retained upon his mind. His last words to his friends were a charge that they should, on his behalf, offer the accustomed sacrifice of a cock to the god of medicine, Esculapius.

Thus did Socrates fail to make a decided stand against Polytheism and idolatry in favour of the spiritual worship of one God. In comparison with this his defect

we need hardly remind the reader that the Bible is distinct and firm in pronouncing on the worship of the one true God as indispensable to virtue and to happiness.

But, it may be questioned, possibly, how far this winking at Polytheism was a fault in Socrates. We are clearly convinced on this point ourselves: but the subject is too large to be now discussed in detail. One set of reflections, which bears strongly on the decision of our own judgment, is all that we can at present suggest to the reader. No maxim in Ethical science is drawn from a larger historical induction than that, As is the deity of a nation so will be the character of the nation. Let the popular mind entertain the notion of gods like Priapus or Aphrodite and lechery, pæderasty and general bestiality are sure to characterize the multitudes who worship at such shrines. Let Wodin be a god in the estimation of any people, and his devotees will not fail to be cruel and bold. Now, if this maxim hold good, all Polytheisms must have a bad moral element in them, for no system of many gods in any religion can be found in which some of the deities are not believed to be mean and vicious. And, yet again, among the crowd of divine personages, the mind of man is confused. The suppliant is at a loss to know from which divinity to ask for help or to which to offer thanks; and so the religious sentiments are blunted and lose their freshness, their reality and their joy. Besides, what may be pleasing to one deity is displeasing to another; and thus even the differences between good and evil, virtue and vice, become necessarily obscured :