olate pools and wide-spread weedy marshes. The
doctrine of Christ has had thus far in the world but very few hearers
who have understood it. Many a modern creed might well go back to
heathenism for improvement. This perversion of Christianity is a
chief element in the difficulty of tracing the real influence of true
Christian teaching upon character. It is this which compels us to draw
a parallel, not so much between the actual characters of ancient and
modern times, if we would rightly understand the differences between
them, as between what we may assume to be the ideal standards of the
heathen and the Christian. But to treat this subject with the fulness
and in the manner which it deserves would lead us too far from Plutarch,
and we have done enough in suggesting it as matter for reflection to
those who read his Lives.

One of the most marked differences in the position of the ancient and
the modern man is that which has been quietly and gradually brought
about by science; but its effect is little recognized by the mass of men
or the most wide-spread churches. It is the difference of his recognized
relations to the universe. While this earth was supposed to be the
central point and main effort of creation, while the earth itself
was unknown, and all the regions of space were regarded as void and
untenanted, save by the inventions of fancy, man may have seemed to
himself a creature of large proportions and of considerable importance.
He measured himself with the gods and the half-gods, and found himself
not much their inferior. In reading Plutarch, one cannot fail to be
struck with the manly self-reliance of his best men of action. Their
piety had no weakness of self-abasement in it. They possessed a piety
toward themselves as well as toward the gods. Timoleon, who was attended
by the good-fortune that waits on noble character, erected in the house
which the Syracusans bestowed upon him an altar to [Greek: Automatia],
which, as Mr. Clough well remarks, in a note, "is almost equivalent to
Spontaneousness. His successes had come, as it were, of themselves." The
act was an acknowledgment of divine favor, and an assertion at the
same time of his individual independence of action. This spirit of
self-dependence was the grandest feature of Greek and Roman heathenism;
and it is in this, if in anything, that a superiority of character is
manifest in the men of ancient times. The famous passage in Seneca's
tragedy, in which Me