e of him, shall not live day and night in awe of his
divine majesty?" As to man's duty to his neighbor, a subject as to which
Pagans before and even after the time of Cicero seem to have had but
vague ideas, the treatise De Officiis is full of it, as indeed is the
whole course of his life. "Omne officium, quod ad conjunctionem hominum
et ad societatem tuendam valet, anteponendum est illi officio, quod
cognitione et scientia continetur."[335] "All duty which tends to
protect the society of man with men is to be preferred to that of which
science is the simple object." His belief in a conscience is shown in
the law he lays down against suicide: "Vetat enim dominans ille in nobis
deus, injussu hinc nos suo demigrare."[336] "That God within us forbids
us to depart hence without his permission." As to justice, I need give
no quotation from his works as proof of that virtue which all his works
have been written to uphold.

This pagan had his ideas of God's governance of men, and of man's
required obedience to his God, so specially implanted in his heart, that
he who undertakes to write his life should not pass it by unnoticed. To
us our religion has come as a thing to believe, though taking too often
the form of a stern duty. We have had it from our fathers and our
mothers; and though it has been given to us by perhaps indifferent
hands, still it has been given. It has been there with all its written
laws, a thing to live by--if we choose. Rich and poor, the majority of
us know at any rate the Lord's Prayer, and most of us have repeated it
regularly during our lives. There are not many of us who have not
learned that they are deterred by something beyond the law from
stealing, from murder, from committing adultery. All Rome and all Romans
knew nothing of any such obligation, unless it might be that some few,
like Cicero, found it out from the recesses of their own souls. He found
it out, certainly. "Suis te oportet illecebris ipsa virtus trahat ad
verum decus." "Virtue itself by its own charms shall lead you the way to
true glory." The words to us seem to be quite commonplace. There is not
a curate who might not put them into a sermon. But in Cicero's time they
were new, and hitherto untaught. There was the old Greek philosopher's
idea that the [Greek: to kalon]--the thing of beauty--was to be found in
virtue, and that it would make a man altogether happy if he got a hold
of it. But there was no God connected with it, no futur