. Lactantius, in the third of his Divine
Institutions, shows that Plato's community of property and women took
away frugality, abstinence, shamefacedness, modesty and justice itself.

Plato, like Lycurgus, ordained that young men should, for the increase
of their physical strength and agility of body, at certain times
exercise themselves naked; that girls and servant-maids should dance
naked among the young men; that women in the flower of their youth
should dance, run, wrestle and ride with young men naked as well as
they, which, says Plato, "whosoever misliketh understandeth not how
profitable it is for the commonwealth."

The morality of ancient times may be clearly seen in the fact that all
manner of debasing things were brought to the front. How could men be
persuaded that adultery should be punished when they were taught from
infancy that it was a virtue among the gods? _Lucian_ gives his
experience thus, "When I was yet a boy, and heard out of _Homer_ and
_Hesiod_ of the adulteries, fornications, rapes and seditions of the
gods, truly I thought that those things were very excellent, and began
even then to be greatly affected towards them, for I could not imagine
that the gods themselves would ever have committed adultery if they had
not esteemed the same lawful and good." To all this it may be added that
the opinions of the ancient philosophers concerning virtue, vice, the
final happiness, and the state of the spirit after death, were diverse
and contradictory. The Epicurean doctrine was, that sovereign happiness
consisted in pleasure. They granted a God, but denied his Providence; so
virtue was without a spur, and vice without a bridle.

The Stoics also granted a Divine Providence, but they maintained such a
fatal necessity that they blunted the edge of all virtuous efforts and
excused themselves in vicious conduct. Both Stoics and Epicureans
doubted the immortality of the human spirit, and thereby opened the way
to all manner of licentiousness.

I am persuaded that eternity alone will fully reveal the consequences of
a denial of a future life and retribution; it is a physical leprosy
which removes all the most powerful incentives to virtue and loosens up
the soul to all manner of lustful gratifications.

A man once remarked: "I have lived four years an avowed infidel. I have
boasted that I would live a good man and die an infidel. I have formed
the acquaintance of all the leading infidels of my country, and