coupled to our bodies, united like the living with the dead."
But whatever might have been the theological side, if one may so express it, of Cicero's religion, the moral aphorisms which meet us here and there in his works have often in them a teaching which comes near the tone of Christian ethics. The words of Petrarch are hardly too strong—"You would fancy sometimes it was not a Pagan philosopher but a Christian apostle who was speaking"[1] These are but a few out of many which might be quoted:—"Strive ever for the truth, and so reckon as that not thou art mortal, but only this thy body; for thou art not that which this outward form of thine shows forth, but each man's mind, that is the real man—not the shape which can be traced with the finger."[2] "Yea, rather, they live who have escaped from the bonds of their flesh as from a prison-house." "Follow after justice and duty; such a life is the path to heaven, and into yon assembly of those who have once lived, and now, released from the body, dwell in that place." Where, in any other heathen writer, shall we find such noble words as those which close the apostrophe in the Tusculans?—"One single day well spent, and in accordance with thy precepts, were better to be chosen than an immortality of sin!"[3] He is addressing himself, it is true, to Philosophy; but his Philosophy is here little less than the Wisdom of Scripture: and the
