exile and to sound the lowest depths of poverty,
exhibited a type of heroic virtue which has hardly been equalled, perhaps
never transcended by a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been
already said, to annihilation as the goal of life, he maintained a spirit
so joyous, and has left in his writings so attractive a picture of a soul
serenely and supremely happy, that he has given support and consolation to
multitudes of the bravest and best disciples of the heaven-born religion,
which he can have known--if at all--only through its slanderers and
persecutors. Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred spirit, and under the even
heavier burdens of a tottering empire, domestic dissensions, and defeat
and disaster abroad, maintained the severest simplicity and purity of
life, appropriated portions of his busiest days to devout contemplation,
meditated constantly on death, and disciplined himself to regard with
contempt alike the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous
fame. We have, especially in Nero's reign, the record of not a few men and
women of like spirit and character, whose lofty and impregnable virtue
lacked only loving faith and undoubting trust in a fatherly Providence to
assimilate them to the foremost among the Apostles and martyrs of the
Christian Church.

*The Sceptical school of philosophy* claims in this connection a brief
notice. Though so identified in common speech with the name of a single
philosopher, that Pyrrhonism is a synonyme for Scepticism, it was much
older than Pyrrho, and greatly outnumbered his avowed followers. It was
held by the teachers of this school that objective truth is unattainable.
Not only do the perceptions and conceptions of different persons vary as
to every object of knowledge; but the perceptions and conceptions of the
same persons as to the same object vary at different times. Nay, more, at
the same time one sense conveys impressions which another sense may
negative, and not infrequently the reflective faculty negatives all the
impressions derived from the senses, and forms a conception entirely
unlike that which would have taken shape through the organs of sense. The
soul that seeks to know, is thus in constant agitation. But happiness
consists in imperturbableness of spirit, that is, in suspense of judgment;
and as it is our duty to promote our own happiness, it is our duty to live
without desire or fear, preference or abhorrence, love or hatred, in
entire apathy,--a