Orphic hymns, meditative as the fragmentary poems of Xenophanes? The taint of the courtier's flattery is visible throughout the tasteful productions of the Mantuan Virgil, and the moralities of Horace evince too clearly that Intellectualism cannot flourish long unsullied when shadowed by the imperial purple, or tempted by the voluptuous pomp of regal halls. Cicero was the first-born of vanity; all his great genius was moulded by, and subservient to every phase of fame and popular applause; the artifice of the rhetorician, not the enthusiasm of the philosopher, reigns paramount in his actions, in his speeches, and his disputations. Seneca was a Scribe, a Pharisee, "a whited sepulchre, foris speciosa, intus plena omni immunditia." Pliny was sincere, he was a votary of truth, his Intellectualism was a column of light that guided him through the false conventions of his time, to the contemplation of beautiful nature; he explored the physical, and every where found traces of the spiritual; and as the body, the organical form of man, is the symbolical expression of his spirit and his soul, he saw written there in characters of flesh and blood, truths which his genius could not analyze, but which raised him above the pantheism of his fellow men, and advanced him to the very portal of the temple of christianity. Tacitus was mighty in the province of history; he discourses with sententious eloquence on the vices and virtues of men, he traces with surprising acuteness the tremendous moral or immoral effect to its minute and latent cause; but the philosophy of politics was his creed, and his spirit was too much occupied with the visible and tangible forms of active life, to expatiate in the regions of the abstract and the ideal. The theurgic wisdom of Porphyry, the theosophism of Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblicus, Apuleius, or Themistius, was but a clouded and indistinct reflexion of the luminous intelligence of their illustrious prototype; like a ray that is refracted into a thousand rich and brilliant colours, his soul bodied forth in the most magnificent language of the world, speculatious graceful, elevated, and profound; they, on the contrary, tar

nished his glories, and in them his doctrines became Not light,

But rather darkness visible.

a

Intellectualism had now advanced through a grand portion of time; what was the sum of its influence on the character of humanity, what was the result of its metaphysical revelations to society? The life of man is transitory, it is a state of suffering, of expiation, laborious and perilous journey; was the accumulated experience of so many thousand years, was the formation, the destruction, the reinstauration of so many systems, efficacious in discovering a means, an instrument for working some salutary change in the destinies of those who taste the cup of sorrow, "who bear the burden and the heat?" İs not the answer a humiliation-a degradation?-When the speculative race of Cham, in the activity of thought, in the consciousness of mental power scrutinized the mysterious laws of nature, Egypt ascended into splendour and importance; yet it was then that tyranny, gigantic and unpitying, ruled with a rod of iron; it was then that fabulous Theogonies were invented, and that mortals changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and beasts and creeping things." When Pythagoras, the apostle of pure and practical wisdom, had transfused his doctrines of spiritual enlightenment into the heart of Greek philosophy, it was then he was forced to seek a foreign clime, "Dominos fugiens, odioque tyrannidis exsul;" oppression was then rampant in Greece, Asia, and Italy; and morality was, as it were, an hieroglyphic, the typical form of which remained, though the sense was lost.

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Socrates arose to complete the aim and purpose of the Pythagorean meditations, to lead Science from the silence of her sacred temples into the full glare of day -into the turbulent and busy vortex of public life; to snatch the young from the arms of pleasure and the enervance of voluptuousness, to inspire the aged with a love of truth ere they descended to the darkness of the tomb. The life of his favourite disciple, Alcibiades,

the condemnation and death of himself-the master, whom the oracle had pronounced to be the wisest among men,-may be assumed as a criterion of the moral temperament of the age. Plato, the representative, the reidentifier of the spiritualism of Socrates, wrought but little change on the manners of the people, destroyed but few of the false conventions of society. The constituted tyranny of Lysander differed but little from the democracy of Thrasybulus, for the real rights of humanity were sacrificed by both. Aristotle abandoned the contemplative school; the product of all genius was rendered by him subservient to the formula of a rigid logic, and God, and nature, and man were compressed into the narrow limits of the syllogism, the perfection of which was his paramount ambition. This mere arithmetic of reason, in its practice soon contracted the fine expanse of Intellectualism, soon chilled the ardour of universal benevolence, and wrapped each individual in a panoply of dogmatic criticism. Let us pass by the Stoics, the Academics, the Epicureans both of Greece and Italy; the doctrines of all were a false expression of the value of Intellectualism. The theocracy of the Mosaic code, however, was a point of glory beaming between the darkness of the Egyptian superstitions, and the multiplex idolatries of Persia, of Greece, and of Rome and its dependant states. The supreme Principle, the Elohim creator, who promulgated his laws in tempestuous magnificence from the heights of Sinaï, revealed to man the knowledge of perfection, but at the same time, left him a freedom to pursue that perfection, according to the mode of his own choice. The Mosaic Judaism was but the preparatory work—the foundation of an alliance that was to meet its completion in the development of a new and purer philosophy -the philosophy of love; when the stern patriotism of the old republics, the absolute egotism of the antient cities, engendering cruelty, slavery, and the despotism of force, was to bend in subjection to the maxims of charity and equality recorded in the gospel of Christianity, and practised by the apostles and their followers.

Here then was the prophetic day-spring-the light that was to ameliorate the condition of humanity-the power that was to plume the wings of Intellectualism in its soarings towards a region, untravelled by the genius of Pythagoras or Plato. The video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor, was the motto of an era that had passed away,-it was now the work of Intellectualism to discard the theoretical cultivation of the soul, to labour in the practice of good, and to impress that good upon external society. Its benefits were not to be confined to tho narrow atmosphere of schools, its performances were not to be abstractions and ascetic meditations, it was to form a universal bond of fellowship-a union of all hearts, and this mission it beautifully accomplished at the commencement, by its simplicity and its ready applicability of moral precept to the common duties of all mankind. How sublime was the task allotted to it,-to unfold the magnificent economy of nature, to demonstrate through the medium of the analogies it furnishes, the correspondence of the superior world with that inferior one, the type and symbol of it, a state in which the Ideal manifests itself under sensible forms, in which visible essences display the beauty of the Invisible, the earthly reveals the spiritual, and the human becomes a glorious enuciator of the divine.

All this was new-the mode of action was new, and the intent and purpose of that action was what the most profound of the old philosophers never contemplated, could never have predicted,—the mission of the apostles had no model in the mental labours of the wisest of either Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Intellectualism now was an active influence, not courting the praises of the passing hour; not feeding itself upon the hopes of a bright posthumous fame, but applying all its energies to embody mankind in the unity of religion, to make the world as one nation, its people of one heart, of one soul. These disciples of a new covenant well comprehended the task they had taken upon themselves, bene eruditi in ratione laborum eorum, says Pope Gregory the Great; they

felt that aspirations and wishes were insufficient, that it was imperative to act, and to impregnate the mass with the power of that action, so that the result would be concentrate, single and definite, exhibiting the phenomina of the blending of divers nations and creeds by the organ of persuasion-a moral syncretism, analogous to the syncretism of nature. This was, indeed, a transcendental act; a luminous Idea springing up in the gloom of discordant and unsatisfactory systems, as we sometimes behold a flower of rare and gorgeous beauty blooming amid the barrenness of the desert.

But the old socialities of Paganism were menaced; the natural law of humanity was culminating, and that law was opposed to the unsparing usurpations of despotism; for servitude, usury, and the sanguinary exhibitions of the circus, were dark stains, unknown to the spotless pages of a code, whose prominent and reiterated precept was, "Love thy neighbour as thyself." What then? Persecution arose-alas! truth and persecution seem to be co-natal, concomitant, inseparable! the shadow to the substance; for as Augustine says, that the infirmities of the body were intended to curb theo'ervaulting ambition' of genius, so persecution may be the furnace for the gold, the purifyer of truth from the macula impressed on it by its contact with the gross and the material. The Neophytes of Christian intellectualism shrunk not from that tremendous proof of the sincerity of their belief,-the testimony of blood; their agonies were the triumphs of devotedness, and their sacrifice was the fructifying principle of theocratic dominion, of spiritual polity and discipline. After three centuries of struggles, the link of association between the Pantheism of antiquity and the Intellectualism of the gospel was almost dissevered, when Constantine flung round the growing faith the influence of his protection, and the capital of a new empire became its sanctuary. Vain were the after-attempts of Julian; the apologetic eloquence of Libanius or Maximus was vain; retrogradation was now impracticable; for civilization was too deeply identified with