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A WORD IN DEFENCE.

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the verbiage, and the want of either accuracy or depth; but still one would like to say something for Cicero. As regards the Catiline conspiracy, for example, it was, to be sure, tremulously, but still it was truly, persistently, and successfully that he broke its neck. There are a considerable number of jokes too current in his name, as of the Roman Vatinius, who had been consul only for a few days, that his consulship had been a most remarkable one, that there had neither been winter, spring, summer, nor autumn during the whole of it; or of that other consulship which had been of only seven hours' duration, that they had then a consul so vigilant that during his whole consulship he had never seen sleep. These and other such jokes attributed to Cicero are to be found in Macrobius; and I, for one, cannot believe that a man with humour in him wanted, like a pedant or a craven, either reality in his soul or substance on his ribs. Rather I will give him credit for both, sincerely thanking him, as well, for his three books, de Natura Deorum.

The lecturer has again gratefully to acknowledge the honouring obligation of Professor Blackie's felicitous verses on occasion of the foregoing :

ATHEISM AND AGNOSTICISM.

(Lines written after hearing the Gifford Lecture by Dr. Hutchison Stirling on the Theism and Theology of the Stoics, Cicero, and the NeoPlatonists, last Saturday in the University.)

All hail, once more! when nonsense walks abroad,
A word of sense is music to the ear

Vexed with the jar of fools who find no God
In all the starry scutcheon of the sphere
Outside their peeping view and fingering pains,
And with the measure of their crude conceit
Would span the Infinite. Where such doctrine reigns
Let blind men ride blind horses through the street :

I'll none of it. Give me the good old Psalm 1
King David sang, and held it deadly sin
To doubt the working of the great I AM

In Heaven above, and voice of law within.
Where'er we turn, from earth, and sea, and sky,
God's glory streams to stir the seeing eye.

JOHN STUART BLACKIE.

1 Psalm xix., which subsumes under one category of intelligent reverence the physical law without, and the moral law within, and thus avoids the error of certain modern specialists, who see only what can can be seen in the limited field of their occupation.

J. S. B.

THE SCOTSMAN, Friday, April 5, 1889.

GIFFORD LECTURE THE TEΕΝΤΗ.

Cicero-To Anselm-The Fathers-Seneca, Pliny, Tacitus-God to the early Fathers-Common consent in the individual and the race - Cicero - Irenaeus, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Arnobius, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, Cyril of Alexandria, Julian, Gregory of Nyssa, and others, Athanasius - Reid, religion, superstition-The Bible-F. C. Baur-Anselm-His argument -The College Essay of 1838-Dr. Fleming-Illustrations from the essay-Gaunilo-Mr. Lewes-Ueberweg, Erdmann, Hegel -The Monologium--Augustine and Boethius-The Proslogium -Finite and infinite - What the argument really means Descartes-Knowledge and belief.

WITH Cicero we reached in our course a most important and critical halting-place. As we have seen, he is even to be regarded as constituting, in respect of the older proofs, the quarry for the argumentation of the future. Henceforth, his works, indeed, are a perfect vallée de la Somme, not for celts, flint-axes, but for topics of discourse. We have still, in the general reference otherwise, to wait those thousand years yet before Anselm shall arrive with what is to be named the new proof, the proof ontological, and during the entire interval it is the Fathers of the Church and their immediate followers who, in repetition of the old, or suggestion of the new, connect thinker with thinker, philosopher with philosopher, pagan with Christian. Before coming to Anselm, then, it is to the Fathers that we must interimistically pass. A word or two may be found in some few intervening writers, as Seneca, perhaps, or Pliny, or even Tacitus; but the respective relevancy is unimportant.

M

Seneca is a specious writer, with a certain inviting ease, as well as a certain attractive modernness of moral and religious tone about him, all of which probably he has to thank for the favour that made him an authoritative teacher during many centuries. But his lesson is seen pretty well now to be merely skin deep, and he is, accordingly, I suppose on the whole, for the most part neglected. Dr. Thomas Brown, I fancy, is about the last writer of repute that takes much note of him. Brown, ore rotundo, does indeed declaim, at considerable length too, in Seneca's glib, loose Latin, from his very first lecture even to his very last; but then we must consider the temptation, as well of the convenience, it may be, as of the ornament. Aulus Gellius assigns to Seneca a diction that is only vulgar and trivial, and a judicium that is but leve and futile. He is in place here only in consequence of the frequency with which he recurs to the idea of God: "Prope a te Deus est, tecum est, intus est; Deus ad homines venit; immo, quod propius est, in homines." That is not badly said, but is it more than said? One reflects on Seneca's laeta paupertas of speech while in midst of the luxury of fact, and on the consequent meek self-sacrifice with which he expatiates on the posse pati divitias! The elder Pliny is, as his time is, quite philosophical in regard to the gods; but he is evidently deeply impressed by the spectacle of the universe, of which there can be but one God, he thinks; who is "all sense, all sight, all hearing, all life, all mind, and all within himself," and that, in terms at least, is the One, Personal, Omniscient, and Omnipotent Deity, whom we ourselves think. Tacitus is later than Pliny, and his judgment is in uncertainty, he admits, whether the affairs of mortals are under the determination of a Providence or at the disposal of chance. The chapter, the 22nd of the sixth book of the Annals, is a remarkable one.

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What strikes us first in the early Christian writers in this reference is the frequency with which they employ that argument that is known as the Consensus Gentium. Nor is this strange. There came to these pagans with Christianity then the awful form of the majestic Jehovah, I Am that I Am, whom German and French writers have taken of late, degradingly, I suppose, familiarizingly, to call Jahve. But under whatever name, He came for the first time then to those we call the ancients, as the Almighty God of this vast universe, the Creator, Maker, Sustainer, and Preserver; the power that is for ever present with us, to note and know, to bless or to punish. This was the one great mightiness, the mystic, here and now present awfulness with whom, to overwhelm, to crush, and destroy, the early Christians confronted the loose rabble of the polytheistic deities, the abstract null of Neo-Platonic emanation, and the gloomy daemons of the wildly heretical Gnosis. This was He of whom Job spoke, of whom the Psalmist sung, with whose wrath the Prophets thunderstruck the sinner. That this God was, that this God alone was, there was, on the part of the Fathers, a universal appeal, as well to the common experience of the nations historically, as to the very heart and inmost conscience of the natural man. Cicero was quoted in many texts, as that, among men, there is no nation so immansueta and so fera as not to know that there is a God. This is a truth which seems to have been insisted on by all the Fathers, from the first to the last. Man, they say, is in his nature endowed by the Creator with such capabilities and powers that, as soon as he attains to the use of reason, he, of himself, and without instruction, recognises the truth of a God, and divine things, and moral action. That is the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world (John i. 9). "All know this," says Irenaeus, "that there is one God,

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