C OFFICE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY _(continued)_.

"If we regard this sublime philosophy as a preparation for
Christianity instead of seeking in it a substitute for the
Gospel, we shall not need to overstate its grandeur in order
to estimate its real value."--Pressense.

"Plato made me to know the true God. Jesus Christ showed me
the way to Him."--St. Augustine.

The preparatory office of Grecian philosophy is also seen in _the
department of morals_.

I. _In the awakening and enthronement of Conscience as a law of duty,
and the elevation and purification of the Moral Idea_.

The same law of evolution, which we have seen governing the history of
speculative thought, may also be traced as determining the progress of
ethical inquiry. In this department there are successive stages marked,
both in the individual and the national mind. There is, first, the
simplicity and trust of childhood, submitting with unquestioning faith
to prescribed and arbitrary laws; then the unsettled and ill-directed
force of youth, questioning the authority of laws, and asking reasons
why this or that is obligatory; then the philosophic wisdom of riper
years, recognizing an inherent law of duty, which has an absolute
rightness and an imperative obligation. There is first a dim and shadowy
apprehension of some lines of moral distinction, and some consciousness
of obligation, but these rest mainly upon an outward law--the observed
practice of others, or the command of the parent as, in some sense, the
command of God. Then, to attain to personal convictions, man passes
through a stage of doubt; he asks for a ground of obligation, for an
authority that shall approve itself to his own judgment and reason. At
last he arrives at some ultimate principles of right, some immutable
standard of duty; he recognizes an inward law of conscience, and it
becomes to him as the voice of God. He extends his analysis to history,
and he finds that the universal conscience of the race has, in all ages,
uttered the same behest. Should he live in Christian times, he discovers
a wondrous harmony between the voice of God within the heart, and the
voice of God within the pages of inspiration. And now the convention of
public opinion, and the laws of the state, are revered and upheld by
him, just so far as they bear the imprimatur of reason and of
conscience--that is, of God.

This history of the normal development of the individual mind