he must reject from
Plato or the Stagyrite twenty times the bulk of questionable
speculations, and dreary subtilties, which separate by long intervals
those gems of moral truth, which everywhere sparkle on the pages of
the New Testament.

I told him I could not help laying great stress on the degree and manner
in which this element enters into the composition of the New Testament;
that ethical truths are there expressed in every variety of form which
can fix them upon the imagination and the heart, with an entire absence
of those prolix discussions and metaphysical refinements which form so
large a portion of Aristotle and Plato. If we find in these writers a
moral truth expressed with something approaching the comprehensive
beauty and simplicity of the Gospels, we are filled with surprise and
rapture, and dig out with joy the glittering fragment from the mass of
earthy matter,--oppressive disquisitions about "ideas" and "essences,"
"energies" and "entelechies," and so forth, in which it is sure to be
imbedded. I promised, if health and life were given, to exhibit some
day these gems, with a sufficient portion of the surrounding earth
still attached to them, and to contrast them with those of the New
Testament. "In this strange volume," I continued, "the most beautiful
ethical maxims exist in unexampled profusion. After reading Aristotle's
ethics, I feel, when I turn to the New Testament, as Linnaeus is said
to have felt when he first saw growing wild the masses of blooming gorse,
which he had never seen in his cold North, except as a sheltered
exotic. Whether it was likely that contemporaries of the Pharisees, who
were sunk in formalism, and who had glossed away every moral and
spiritual the Law, could reach and maintain such elevation of tone,
I leave you to judge." But though I felt this, I acknowledged that
it was difficult to express it; and said that perhaps the best way to
compare the morality of the New Testament with the ethical system of
any philosopher, or the code of any legislator, would be to imagine
them all universally adopted, and see how much would have to be
objected to,--how much "brick" was mingled with the "porphyry." "If,
for example," said I, "Plato, who, I admit, so flashes upon us the
sublimest and most comprehensive principles of morals, and whose
ethical system you say is identical with that of Christianity, had
the forming of a republic, you would have community of women property,
--women t