which tendency, as it affected Christian ethics, was confirmed by the
Renaissance enthusiasm for the works of Aristotle and Cicero, from whom
the code of the fifteenth century virtues was borrowed, and whose
authority was then infinitely more revered by all the Doctors of the
Church than that either of St. Paul or St. Peter.

Sec. XLVIII. Although, however, this change in the tone of the Christian
mind was most distinctly manifested when the revival of literature
rendered the works of the heathen philosophers the leading study of all
the greatest scholars of the period, it had been, as I said before,
taking place gradually from the earliest ages. It is, as far as I know,
that root of the Renaissance poison-tree, which, of all others, is
deepest struck; showing itself in various measures through the writings
of all the Fathers, of course exactly in proportion to the respect which
they paid to classical authors, especially to Plato, Aristotle, and
Cicero. The mode in which the pestilent study of that literature
affected them may be well illustrated by the examination of a single
passage from the works of one of the best of them, St. Ambrose, and of
the mode in which that passage was then amplified and formulized by
later writers.

Sec. XLIX. Plato, indeed, studied alone, would have done no one any harm.
He is profoundly spiritual and capacious in all his views, and embraces
the small systems of Aristotle and Cicero, as the solar system does the
Earth. He seems to me especially remarkable for the sense of the great
Christian virtue of Holiness, or sanctification; and for the sense of
the presence of the Deity in all things, great or small, which always
runs in a solemn undercurrent beneath his exquisite playfulness and
irony; while all the merely moral virtues may be found in his writings
defined in the most noble manner, as a great painter defines his
figures, _without outlines_. But the imperfect scholarship of later ages
seems to have gone to Plato, only to find in him the system of Cicero;
which indeed was very definitely expressed by him. For it having been
quickly felt by all men who strove, unhelped by Christian faith, to
enter at the strait gate into the paths of virtue, that there were four
characters of mind which were protective or preservative of all that was
best in man, namely, Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance,[142]
these were afterwards, with most illogical inaccuracy, called cardinal
_virtues_, P