I was afraid. I got up and ran after my sheep, trying to enliven myself, but I trembled much."

Moffat informs us that some of the tribes of Africa are so degraded as, apparently, to have no idea of a supreme power; but this is the exception, not the rule. As intelligence and civilization advance, the idea of "the Divine " becomes, in all countries, more distinct and luminous. It rises with science and virtue, appropriates to itself all beautiful forms, and "sits enthroned on the riches of the universe."

It is owing to the depth and permanence of this original instinct or intuition, blind as it occasionally seems, and much perverted by ig

*Further investigations show decisively that the exception scarcely exists, even among the most superstitious tribes of Africa; the word Morimo, which means the Supreme Spirit, is found as a relic of some better knowledge now lost. Mr. Livingston says that the recently-discovered tribes in the interior of Africa have an idea of a supreme God. This is corroborated by Mr. Bowen, who says the people in Yarouba believe in one God, though the national worship is directed to inferior deities, both benign and malignant. They speak of him as "over all," and call him "the Owner of heaven." Their language contains those terms which enable the missionary to speak to them intelligently of the Deity, of sin, guilt, moral obligation, &c. Some of their traditions would indicate an Oriental origin. Every where the ark is an object of reverence. Missionaries and others intimately acquainted with the Indians, say that those tribes who have been secluded from intercourse with the whites have a distinct idea of a supreme Spirit. They worship ther spirits, but especially venerate the Great Spirit, and recognize the eternal distinction of right and wrong, with the doctrine of reward and punishment. This is corroborated by Mr. Catlin and Mr. Schoolcraft.

norance and lust, that the race, as such, especially in its more active centres, has always occupied itself with the problem of God, or the gods, those supreme and eternal powers supposed to preside over the universe, and has always organized itself, as we have said, around some fundamental belief in reference to duty and destiny. Thus Plato over and over again affirms that a belief in God, or the gods, is a natural and universal instinct.* "Examine," says Plutarch, in his tract against Coletes, the Epicurean, "the face of the earth, and you may find cities unfortified, unlettered, without a regular magistrate or distinct habitations, without possessions, property, or the use of money, and unskilled in all the magnificent and polished arts of life; but a city without the knowledge of God or religion, without the use of vows, oaths, oracles, and sacrifices to procure good, or of deprecatory rites to avert evil, no man can or ever will find." So also in his Consolatio ad Apollonium, he declares, "it was so ancient an opinion that good men should be recompensed

* See especially De Legibus, (lib. x.,) Contra Atheos. Plato, indeed, sees clearly enough that the instinct referred to is often feeble, as well as subject to great perversion. In himself, it was not entirely free from superstition; yet who, with the slightest knowledge of his works, will deny the strength and grandeur with which it developed itself in his sublime speculations on the true, the beau tiful, and the good, as eternal entities in the bosom of God?

at death, that he could not reach either the author or the origin of it." In his Tusculan Questions, Cicero bears the same testimony. "As our innate ideas," he says, "discover to us that there are gods, [or a God; for Cicero often uses the term gods, when he means simply God,] whose attributes we deduce from reason, so, from the consent of all nations and people, we conclude that the soul is immortal." In another place, he affirms that this, as well as the sense of justice, must be "a law of nature."

Errors and superstitions of course mingled with ancient myths and traditions; but they were based upon an original intuition, if not an original revelation. In corroboration of this view. we find Aristotle averring that "it was an ancient saying, received by all from their ancestors, that all things exist by and through the power of God, who, being one, (els,) was known by many names, according to his modes of manifestation " a testimony as striking as it is profound.t

*Tus. Disp. i. 30. "Omnis autem in re consensio omnium gentium lex naturæ putanda est." Compare De Natura Deorum, i. 43, as also lib. ii. 12. Cicero, being an Academic, often presents his opinions in the form of doubts; but his real sentiments were unquestionably favorable to the doctrine of God and the immortality of the soul. How striking, for example, is the following: "Esse præstantem aliquam æternamque naturam, et eam suspiciendam admirandamque hominum generi, pulchritudo mundi ordoque rerum cœlestium cogit confiteri.". De Divin. lib. ii.

+ See De Mundo, c. 6, 7. A similar passage is referred to by Ne

It need not surprise us, then, that the great thinkers of the race, those who have gone beneath appearances to grasp the reality of things, have always tended to a common centre of speculative thought. The idea of the Infinite has always swept them within its mystic circle. God, the soul, and immortality; the eternal past, the eternal future, and the all-embracing Life in which they become one, are the majestic themes which have occupied their lives. The old Chaldean, Hindoo, and Egyptian sages, the Pythagoreans, the Sophists, the Socratists, Plato and Aristotle, the Academics, the Stoics, the NeoPlatonists, in fact every class of Grecian thinkers, as also the Roman philosophers, though much inferior to the Grecian in vigor and comprehensiveness of mind, took a more or less distinguished part in the discussion of these subjects. Among the questions which the ancients considered as lying at the foundation of all science and philosophical reasoning were the following: "1. Whether there is a creative power in the universe; 2. Whether this power is invested with the attributes of wisdom, goodness, and truth; 3. Whether the mind of man forms a

ander, as quoted by Plutarch, (De Defectu Oraculorum,) from the Antigone of Sophocles; but we have been unable to verify it in the Antigone as now extant. Compare Plutarch, Adver. Stoicos, c. 22 Cicero, De Legibus, lib. ii. 107.

part, or is made analogous to the divine mind, or principle; 4. Whether this intellectual part of man is of an absolutely spiritual nature, and is endowed with immortality; 5. Whether there is any thing absolutely true or absolutely good in the nature of things; 6. Whether the true and the good relative to man be the same in the essence as the true and the good relative to the divine nature; 7. Whether man is an object of care or interest in the divine economy, and whether he has any means of ascertaining the fact; 8. Whether we have any definite meaning in the mind when we make use of such words as justice, power, existence, intelligence, benevolence, virtue, vice."

Their methods of reasoning, somewhat variable, may be deemed fallacious; but the fact remains that, even in their logical and philosophical investigations, these were the great questions from which they started, and to which they constantly returned.

A few philosophers, subtle and penetrating, but cold and sterile, like Epicurus and Comte, have lingered in mere mechanism, never transcending the outward and perishable. Others, like Aristotle and Hegel, have lost themselves in abstractions, even while recognizing absolute and eternal being; and others, like Pyrrho and Lucre