profound thought as the first two centuries of the Christian

era, and any volume that tends to illuminate this period is a

gift not lightly to be laid aside. Dr. Oakesmith's scholarly monograph on the religion of Plutarch is a book that we must certainly welcome for its qualities of style and unobtrusive learning, as well as for the light that it throws in very con-

siderable abundance upon an epoch that has in a large measure been left to unread specialists. This book is the work of a

specialist, but it is nevertheless full of interest, and we may

even add, distinction, throughout. The comparative neglect of Plutarch's Opera Morelia in England up to quite recent days is sufficiently surprising. Paley, writing in the Encyclo- paedia Britannica in 1885, declared that " it is certain that to most persons in Britain the Opera Morelia of Plutarch are practically almost unknown." It is true that in 1603 Philemon Holland, "the translator generall in his age," to use Fuller's ph rase about him, dedicated to James I. his translation from the Greek of " the philosophy, com- monly called the Morals, written by the learned philosopher Plutarch of Clue: onea," and that a revised and corrected edition of this translation appeared in 1657. This English

edition was followed, only, however, at an interval of more than two centuries, by Dr. Goodwin's edition of 1870, which collected translations by various scholars. In 1888 and 1889

two far from perfect volumes of translations were issued in the " Bohn Series." As yet, however, Dr. Oakesmith con- siders that there is no English " authorised version" in

existence, and "so far as the literary presentment of results is concerned, the Ethics ' of Plutarch are a neglected field

of research." Dr. Oakesmith, availing himself of the recent textual work of Mr. G. N. Bernardakis (the director of the

the Gymnasium at Mytilene) and of Mr. W. R. Paton, and of the work done between 1854 and the present time with respect to the general philosophic and historical position by C. G. Seibert, Octave Greard, R. Volkmann, Archbishop Trench, August Schlemm, and others, has set himself the congenial task of filling the gap. We think we may say that he has done

BO with marked success, and that his work will prove useful in perhaps unexpected directions.

Plutarch was born at Chaeronea, in Boeotia, before the middle of the first century of our era. He flourished under the Roman Emperors from Nero to Trajan, possibly surviving Trajan, who died in 117 A.D. To the general reader he is best known by his "Parallel Lives " of Greek and Roman worthies, works of great learning and considerable accuracy.

The period in which he wrote and which he vividly reflects is of extraordinary interest. The Republic had fallen a century before, and the mists of a dead age still lay heavy on the souls of men. The Republic had died of social exhaustion. "The epoch ends, the world is still." There was, says Dr. Mommsen, " much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste,

and least of all true delight in life. It was indeed an old world; and even the richly gifted patriotism of Caesar could not make it young again." Matthew Arnold in " Oberman Once More," with his incomparable touch, has summed up the age. The Roman noble was weary of it all :— " He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crown'd his hair with flowers— No easier nor no quicker pass'd

The impracticable hours."

The passage of a century but deepened the night, and the Empire found peace and joy in no outward things :- " She broke her flutes, she stopp'd her sports, Her artists could not please;

She tore her books, she shut her courts, She fled her palaces; Lust of the eye and pride of life She left it all behind."

The need of spiritual life, of a new soul-searching, was hers. For more than two centuries Rome had ached for belief. The State religion had become mere mechanism. The philosophy of the Stoa, that had grafted the noble doctrines of the jus • (1.) The Religion of Plutarch: a Pagan Crud of Apostolic Times. An Essay. By John Oakesmith, D.Litt., M.A. London Longman and Co. De. net.] —(2.) The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus a New Rendering Based on the Poulis Translation of 1742. By George W. Chr ystal. London: B. C. Brown and Co.

naturals on the artificial Pal civile and had preached the immortality of the soul, had lost all its old vigour and reality, and was crushed by the Epicureans represented by Lucretius and treated with scorn by the generation of Oatullus. The world was atheist, and the inevitable religious impulses of the heart were satisfied with the gods of Persia and of Egypt, and with the eclectic Neo-Platonism that mingled the mysteries of East and South into a hotch-pot of charlatanism. At such a moment there came upon the scene Plutarch the Chaeronean. That he represented a class of thought, a stratum of religious society, we have every reason to believe, and that his influence and writings gave this class of thought a definite position in the philosophy of religion it is impossible to doubt. Dr. Oakesmith take up the story at this point. He shows us that the ancient Roman religion was in a manner subplanted by Greek philosophy, which gave men the idea of conscious personal morality, and that this was in the long run the saving factor in Roman life. The individualism of Socrates and Aristotle and the idealism of Plato went to the making of Plutarch's beliefs ; and the Stoics and Epicureans enabled him to evolve an idea of personal virtue :—

"The absorbing interest of Plutarch as a moral philosopher lies mainly in the fact that though, as a polemical writer, he is an opponent, and not always a fair or judicious opponent, both of the Porch and the Garden, he collects from any quarter any kind of teaching which he hopes to find useful in inculcating that ideal of conduct which he believes most likely to work out into virtue and happiness ; and though his most revered teacher is Plato, the ideal of conduct which he inculcates is one which Epicurus would have wished his friend Metrodorus to appropriate and exemplify. This ideal Plutarch thought worth preservation ; it is the last intel- ligible and practicable ideal presented to us by Paganism ; and the attempts which Plutarch made to preserve it are interesting as those of a man who stood at a crisis in the world's history, and endeavoured to find, in the wisdom and strength and splendour of the Past, a sanction for purity and goodness, when a sanction for purity and goodness was being mysteriously formed, in com- parison with which the wisdom and strength and splendour of the Past were to be regarded but as weakness and darkness and folly. The experiment was not without success for a considerable time; and •had Paganism been defended by Julian in the pliant form which Plutarch gave it, and in tlxe spirit of tolerance which he infused into his defence of it, it is probable that the harmonious co-operation, and perhaps the complete union, of the classical tradition and the Christian faith would have been the early and .beneficial result."

We have quoted this long passage as it seems to us to be extremely suggestive, and, we may add, to be open in the last sentence to considerable criticism. In fact, Dr. Oakesmith appears to us to have missed a most valuable point in the midst of his endeavours to prove the real value of Plutarch's ethical and theological systems. We agree that the ethics of Plutarch are probably not " coloured by Christian modes of thought," though it is difficult to believe that Plutarch did not ;some into contact with many learned Jews, and his knowledge of the persecution of Christians following on the burning of Rome in 65 A.D. must have been full. The point is this.

There does not seem any sufficient explanation in any available history of the spread of Christianity from Rome and from Greece outwards. Gibbon's "five causes of the growth of Christianity " do not solve the mystery, though the second "cause," the pre-Christian doctrine of the immortality of the eon:, is helpful. In order for any seed to flourish to the best advantage it must be sown in a suitable seed-plot. In other words, it was essential to the rooting of Christianity into the soil of the spiritual world that that soil should have been pre- pared and made fit by some system of ethics and applied religion. Now we submit that Plutarch's Hardie proves that the various creeds, superstitions, and philosophies that had centred in Rome and Athens had evolved as a resultant a theology and an ethical system that were capable of preparing the thinking world for the advent of Christ and the acceptance, as the only and the true God, of that unknown God whom the Athenians ignorantly worshipped. Consequently, we think that it is not sufficient to show that Plutarch is not indebted to Christianity. The historian must go on to show that Christianity is indebted to Plutarch. Dr. Oakesmith does not duly labour this point.

Dr. Oakesmith's pages show us how fine and true a religion Plutarch, and his school of conduct and belief, evolved for themselves out of the ashes of belief and the dust of thought that the dead age had left behind. We are inclined to think that the author of this book in his endeavours to show that a large section of society, in an age

scandalous by repute, was good and sound• gees somewhat farther than is justified by the facts, for while we gladly admit that the world was taking to itself characteristics that rendered the rapid adoption of Christianity possible, yet, on the other hand, we cannot forget that ,this period exhibits extraordinary aspects of exhaustion in every branch of mental activity. The importance of Plutarch's work was that he applied reason to religion before the spread of Christianity, and so rendered unlikely the adoption into the new religion of much of the gross superstition of the old. " Philosophy . . .‘ . . must be our Mystagogue to Theology : we must borrow Reason from Philosophy, and take her as our guide to the mysteries of Religion, reverently submitting every detail of creed or practice to her authority." Plutarch does not, however, wish to throw aside " the ancient and hereditary Faith." His God is, nevertheless, one and in- divisible, personal and thinking, eternal and immutable.' But his God is not the remote Platonic Being, not a quiet far-off Epicurean god. The God of Plutarch is interested in the beings he has made. If God is a Providence, then there is an after life. But how is all this consistent with the polytheism of the heathen world? The two systems are connected by the principle of daemonology that made the lower gods and spirits move between men and the Eternal.

We could wish to pursue this book at greater length, but we have endeavoured to indicate what we consider to be the really historic value of the Moralia. That this religion-of preparation lasted for a sufficient period to enable Christianity-to take root is clear from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,— that "noblest of pagans, the crown and flower of Stoicism?' His lifetime (121-180 A.D.) saw a considerably rapid growth in the number of Christians, and despite the persecution that the policy of the great Emperor involved, Christianity still found her converts among those who walked in the way of the Medita- tions of Aurelius. The exquisite edition of this immortal work that lies before us (in a new rendering—the balanced phrasing of which reminds us forcibly of Sir Thomas Browne--by Mr. George W. Chrystal, based on the Foulis translation of 1742) brings this fact most vividly to mind. With Aurelius died the application of philosophy to life : with the coming of the terrible Commodus men at last found in their need faith and hope instead. It did not require the closing of the Athenian schools of the Neo-Platonists in 529 A.D. to prove that true religion was a thing apart from that farrago of Trinitarian, Platonism and Charlatanism which was the final form of the philosophy that Publius Nigidius Figulus had introduced before the fall of the Republic. Henceforward for many centuries philosophy was destined to clog religious and scientific thought, but it can be forgiven much in the fact that, passing through the mind of Plutarch and his school, it had prepared the world for Christianity.