good, and, as good, is a rewarder of goodness. But the noblest and most decisive passage is found in the tenth book of the Laws. "How," says he, when about to enter on the argument of natural theology, (and we wish those who are giving weight to that theology to see where Plato laid the real foundation of belief)-" how without passion can we reason to prove the existence of God? It must be with bitterness of heart-with batred and indignation against men, who compel us to engage in such an argument. They who once trusted to the tales, which from their childhood, when lying on the breast, they used to hear from their nurses and their mothers-tales told to soothe or awe them, and repeated like charms above their cradles-who heard them blended at the altar with prayers, and all the pomps and rituals so fair to the eye of a child;-while those same parents were offering up their sacrifices with all solemnity-earnestly and awfully praying for themselves and for their children, and with vows and supplications holding communion with God, as indeed a living God;-who when the sun and the moon arose, and passed again to their settings, heard of and witnessed all around them the kneeling and prostrate forms of Greeks and barbarians alike—all men in all their joys and all their sorrows, clinging as it were to God, not as an empty name, but as their all in all; and never suffering the fancy to intrude that God has no existence ;they who have despised all this-and without one justifying cause compel us now to reason as we do-how can such men expect, that with calm and gentle words we should be able to admonish and to teach them the existence of a God." Such is the decision of Plato on the fundamental question in the education of man, the use and importance of authority; not that Aristotle would have answered otherwise,* or any other sect worthy of the name of philosophy. Even the Pyrrhonist recognised authority as the foundation of his unbelief, and by the common consent of mankind endeavour to prove that no such consent could be trusted. In the same manner the still lower school of Sophistry, which made each man "the measure of all things," had, notwithstanding, its teachers and pupils, and held out its promises of instruction, with a demand of confidence in their wisdom. And in its most degraded and vitiated form of a Callicles or a Thrasymachus, it only transferred the authority from a reason without to a passion within, and still gave up the individual as a slave to a power which impelled him blindly he knew not whither. Undoubtedly, wherever we turn, this is the question, the question of authority, that meets us, and re-appears in every difficulty which embarrasses either the Church or the country. Every age has some one principle, or, to use a phrase very current in the new speculations of France, "represents an idea of its own," Ethics, b. 1, c. 3. + Gorgias. § Republic. which it is the business of the philosophical observer to detect, and of those who are appointed to watch over the minds of men to regulate or expel; and this is the idea of the present day. Our legislation, year after year, is a series of concessions to the people, because no one but the people has a right to pronounce on their own interests or duties. The state is to be desecrated and unchristianized, because no human power may decide between contending opinions in religion. The polity of the Church is set aside, because man must not bend to man, but must be left in independence and solitude to judge of the mysteries of Heaven by the taper-light of his own reason alone, and to worship his Maker as he chooses. Our old schemes of educution are to be remodelled to meet the wishes and opinions of those, to correct and control whose opinions all education is appointed. And when a new system is established, as in Ireland, for a whole nation to be won over to the truth, the same fatal idea rises up, and, as if by special contrivance, the very notion of authority is extinguished in the minds of the young, by bringing their teachers before them in direct and perpetual collision, on the most solenn of subjects; and by exhibiting in their daily tasks a conflict of difficulties and doubts, which can end but in an alternative of evilseither absolute unbelief on the one hand, or absolute subjection, on the other, to the boldest assumer of a spiritual despotism. How is it that we have fallen into this gulf? How is it that we have forgotten not only the arguments of reason, but the very first instincts of our hearts, instincts that rise up before our face, at the very moment we attempt to belie them, and which we may misuse and calumniate, but cannot extinguish? We are unsettling the very foundation of Christianity by resting it on the useless support of an unsound natural theology-because we distrust the true basis on which it was placed by its Founder-the authority of its teachers. We are admitting into our philosophical schools, cold, feeble, undigested novelties, to engross and mislead the public mind, if the word leading can be applied to an influence, which only retards and embarrasses-because we are ashamed to acknowledge our adherence to the guides of antiquity. We are directing both public measures and private duties, measuring our politics and our ethics by the most false and fatal standard that human ingenuity ever devised, the standard of expediency; cutting off all reference to the past; denying the providence of Him who in making goodness the law of the world, made it also the preservation of the world; stifling our natural affections; annihilating the very essence of virtue; converting the whole of life into a business of calculation, and of calculation without data or end-simply * See Scripture Lessons of the Irish Education Board. because we are afraid of walking humbly by the precedents of our forefathers, of taking old lights to guide us in old ways, of trusting to the prejudices of nature, and boldly replying by her voice, as it is echoed by the whole of mankind, to those cavils of a curious casuistry" why is this right, and this wrong ?--why are we pleased, or why are we pained? as if it were not enough to say, that we approve and censure, and love and hate, and believe and obey, because nature has formed us thus; because such are our natural feelings, and we know they are true to nature, because no warning voice has risen from our fellows to condemn them— as if nothing was true which did not come within the range of our knowledge-nothing to be admitted as the witness of a power above ourselves-nothing believed until proved, instead of all things to be believed until disproved. And all this arises from one and the same source, our contempt or distrust of authority. Such was not the language of the old apologists when they were called on to defend Christianity, against the charge of a credulous faith. Even with far less advantages than ours-their persons despised, their polity not yet consolidated, their supernatural power denied, or paralleled with those of adversaries; with no support from the confession of the civilized world, or the tradition of eighteen centuries, they still met the charge face to face, and even in the midst of the most powerful appeals to reason, directed to the refutation of heathens, they upheld the principle of faith as applied to the education of Christians. "How," say they, "can a physician heal the sick, if the sick will not trust to his skill ?”** "How can grammar, or geometry, or astronomy, or any other science or art, be taught, unless men, on the authority of their teachers, receive lessons which they do not understand?" Who waits till he has examined opinions before he allies himself to a sect, or could even select his party, if he thus shrunk from committing himself to a teacher, in the fear lest his confidence should be abused? Such is the dictate of nature. All men, in the words of Cicero, "Ante tenentur astricti, quam quid esset optimum, judicare potuerunt. Deinde infirmissimo tempore ætatis, aut obsecuti amico cuidam, aut unâ alicujus quem primum audierunt oratione capti, de rebus incognitis judicant, et ad quamcumque sunt disciplinam quasi tempestate delati ad eam tanquam ad saxum adhærescunt." And without such a happy law of attraction, to give order and stability to the world, society would be reduced into atoms; and those atoms left fluctuating about in a chaos of Euseb. Præp. Evang. lib. 1. Theodoret. Græc. Affec. Cur. lib. 1. doubt and darkness; or rather sinking into stagnation, because in reasoning beings no part can move where none is at rest, and may serve as a resting-place to others. On this principle of faith depends the whole activity of life. "Who," says Origen, " embarks upon a voyage, who marries a wife, who begets children, who cultivates the soil, except in the trust of good to come; though evil still may come, and often does come? And yet this hope and faith sends many courageously on deeds where noue can tell the end; how much rather for a cause far other than a voyage, a marriage, or a harvest, shall we repose this faith in Him who endured such sufferings for us, and sent out his disciples upon earth, braving danger, and exile, and death, for the salvation of man.”—Origen, cont. Cels. lib. i. c. 11. If We have now finished this rough sketch, not of the philosophy of Plato, for that would require a very different kind of discussion, but of the plan on which his philosophy seems to have formed itself, to meet the exigencies of his melancholy times. any other can be framed, which serves more clearly to open the many acknowledged cyphers in his works, and give aim to their meaning, and order to their seeming confusion, this must be still more near to the truth. But no theory which leaves them as they are in the eyes of the world-an undigested mass of oratory and poetry, scepticism and dogmatism, irony and seriousness, more like the wreck and ruin of a noble mind, than a system organized and revised by him to the last moments of his life, can do justice to the intention, or can interpret the sentiments of him who, by common consent, is the "father and king of philosophy." We have wished to show that his aim was practical, not idle speculation-that it was directed, in all its parts, against a most false and pernicious school, the natural product of the rationalistic licentious age in which he lived. If his system is to be revived now, let it be revived in this form, and directed against the same nuisance, and it may do the Church and the country infinite service. In this view we think, in England, men are beginning to feel, if not to understand it. And we shall not hesitate to assist, as much as lies in our power, in bringing it more fully to the light. ART. II. Geraldine-a Tale of Conscience. By E. C. A. In 2 vols. London: Booker and Dolman. 1837. THIS is the work of a clever and observant person, though not practised in writing. It is a tale with little incident and no ending; or rather it is an attempt at a tale, which is left unravelled. But in truth its object is very different from that of putting out of hand a well-managed plot, being no other than to recommend the Roman Catholic religion to the favourable notice of the English Protestant; and accordingly it is made up principally of discussions on various points of faith and usage and sketches of character, such as are naturally suggested by the present state and peculiarities of religious parties. In these sketches we conceive the merit of the book lies, for the argumentative portion, as far as it is on the offensive, though not deficient in smartness, is not beyond the ability, and scarcely beyond the opinions, of any one who is not blinded by Ultra-Protestantism; and as far as it is a defence of Romanism, it fails strangely even in matters of fact. Similar failure attends its Roman Catholic sketches, which form an exception, as all readers will feel, to the general spirit and effectiveness of the author's style. It may be, that caricature is much easier than correct drawing, or that true excellence cannot be delineated by a few strokes, or brought out in its substance at the will of a writer; but, however we account for it, De Grey, Angela, Lady Winefride, and Mr. Bernard are but varieties of the "pius Eneas," with the same ambition in the writer, the same failure in the production. The other characters, however, are for the most part amusingly drawn, and some of them, it must be confessed, good hits. There is a religious indifferentist, with a sufficient insight into the absurdities of the popular ways of thought, a hankering after Catholicity, and a kindness towards the imaginative parts of Romanism; a Whig lord enduring Protestantism and Romanism, yet attached to neither; a High-Church Oxford divine; a Reformation-Society Protestant; a pert young lady inclined to the Presbyterian persuasion; and a parish clergyman of the modern school, amiable, active, uxorious and absurd. Among these personages the heroine moves, being the only child of a widowed father, and heiress of his estates, who, after going through the phases of Protestantism, as it exists among us, seeks for something deeper and truer in Anglicanism, or, as Mr. Palmer more correctly speaks in his recent work, Anglo-Catholicism; is disappointed, and at length finds in the Church of Rome the refuge which she is in quest of, |