should be, not what
we shall eat, but how shall we resist temptation; how shall we keep the
soul pure; how shall we arrive at virtue; how shall we best serve our
country; how shall we best educate our children; how shall we expel
worldliness and deceit and lies; how shall we walk with God?--for there
is a God, and there is immortality and eternal justice: these are the
great certitudes of human life, and it is only by these that the soul
will expand and be happy forever.

Thus there was a close connection between his philosophy and his ethics.
But it was as a moral teacher that he won his most enduring fame. The
teacher of wisdom became subordinate to the man who lived it. As a
living Christian is nobler than merely an acute theologian, so he who
practises virtue is greater than the one who preaches it. The dissection
of the passions is not so difficult as the regulation of the passions.
The moral force of the soul is superior to the utmost grasp of the
intellect. The "Thoughts" of Pascal are all the more read because the
religious life of Pascal is known to have been lofty. Augustine was the
oracle of the Middle Ages, from the radiance of his character as much as
from the brilliancy and originality of his intellect. Bernard swayed
society more by his sanctity than by his learning. The useful life of
Socrates was devoted not merely to establish the grounds of moral
obligation, in opposition to the false and worldly teaching of his day,
but to the practice of temperance, disinterestedness, and patriotism. He
found that the ideas of his contemporaries centred in the pleasure of
the body: he would make his body subservient to the welfare of the soul.
No writer of antiquity says so much of the soul as Plato, his chosen
disciple, and no other one placed so much value on pure subjective
knowledge. His longings after love were scarcely exceeded by Augustine
or St. Theresa,--not for a divine Spouse, but for the harmony of the
soul. With longings after love were, united longings after immortality,
when the mind would revel forever in the contemplation of eternal ideas
and the solution of mysteries,--a sort of Dantean heaven. Virtue became
the foundation of happiness, and almost a synonym for knowledge. He
discoursed on knowledge in its connection with virtue, after the
fashion of Solomon in his Proverbs. Happiness, virtue, knowledge: this
was the Socratic trinity, the three indissolubly connected together, and
forming the life o