man's business.

ALL THINGS ORDERED BY GOD.

(_By Seneca._)

Every man knows without telling, that this wonderful fabric of the
universe is not without a Governor, and that a constant order can not
be the work of chance, for the parts would then fall foul one upon
another. The motions of the stars, and their influences, are acted by
the command of an eternal decree. It is by the dictate of an Almighty
Power, that the heavy body of the earth hangs in balance. Whence come
the revolutions of the seasons and the flux of the rivers? the
wonderful virtue of the smallest seeds? as an _oak_ to arise from an
_acorn_. To say nothing of those things that seem to be most irregular
and uncertain; as clouds, rain, thunder, the eruptions of fire out of
mountains, earthquakes, and those tumultuary motions in the lower
region of the air, which have their ordinate causes, and so have those
things, too, which appear to us more admirable because less frequent;
as scalding fountains and new islands started out of the sea; or what
shall we say of the ebbing and flowing out of the ocean, the constant
times and measures of the tides, according to the changes of the moon
that influences most bodies; but this needs not, for it is not that we
doubt of providence, but complain of it. And it were a good office to
reconcile mankind to the gods, who are undoubtedly best to the best.
It is against nature that good should hurt good. A good man is not
only the friend of God, but the very image, the disciple, and the
imitator of Him, and a true child of his heavenly Father. He is true
to himself, and acts with constancy and resolution.

PLUTARCH.

Plutarch was born A.D. 90, in Chaeronea, a city of Boeotia. To him we
are indebted for so many of the lives of the philosophers, poets,
orators and generals of antiquity. No book has been more generally
sought after or read with greater avidity than "Plutarch's Lives."
However ancient, either Greek or Latin, none has received such a
universal popularity. But the character of Plutarch himself, not less
than his method of writing biography, explains his universal
popularity, and gives its special charm and value to his book. He was
a man of large and generous nature, of strong feeling, of refined
tastes, of quick perceptions. His mind had been cultivated in the
acquisition of the best learning of his times, and was disciplined by
the study of books as well as of men. He deserves the title of
philosophe