rines appear are remarkable.

1. Like Socrates and Epictetus, he wrote nothing himself.

2. But he had not, like them, a Xenophon or an Arrian to write for
him. I name not Plato, who only used the name of Socrates to cover
the whimsies of his own brain. On the contrary, all the learned of his
country, entrenched in its power and riches, were opposed to him, lest
his labors should undermine their advantages; and the committing to
writing his life and doctrines fell on unlettered and ignorant men; who
wrote, too, from memory, and not till long after the transactions had
passed.

3. According to the ordinary fate of those who attempt to enlighten and
reform mankind, he fell an early victim to the jealousy and combination
of the altar and the throne, at about thirty-three years of age, his
reason having not yet attained the maximum of its energy, nor the
course of his preaching, which was but of three years at most, presented
occasions for developing a complete system of morals.

4. Hence the doctrines which he really delivered were defective as
a whole, and fragments only of what he did deliver have come to us,
mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible.

5. They have been still more disfigured by the corruptions of
schismatizing followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating
and perverting the simple doctrines he taught, by engrafting on them the
mysticisms of a Grecian sophist, frittering them into subtleties, and
obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good men to reject
the whole in disgust, and to view Jesus himself as an impostor.

Notwithstanding these disadvantages, a system of morals is presented to
us, which, if filled up in the style and spirit of the rich fragments he
left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught
by man.

The question of his being a member of the God-head, or in direct
communication with it, claimed for him by some of his followers, and
denied by others, is foreign to the present view, which is merely an
estimate of the intrinsic merit of his doctrines.

1. He corrected the Deism of the Jews, confirming them in their belief
of one only God, and giving them juster notions of his attributes and
government.

2. His moral doctrines, relating to kindred and friends, were more pure
and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers, and
greatly more so than those of the Jews; and they went far beyond both in
inculcating univers