ere were
great pretenders then, as now, who maintained it was the only certainty.
But the speculations of scientists disgusted him, for he saw nothing in
them upon which to base incontrovertible truth. They were mere dreams
and baseless theories on the origin of the universe. They were even
puerile; and they were then, as now, atheistic in their tendency. They
mocked the consciousness of mankind. They annihilated faith and
Providence. At best, they made all things subject to necessity, to an
immutable fate, not to an intelligent and ever-present Creator. But
Cicero, like Socrates, believed in God and in providential
interference,--in striking contrast with Caesar, who believed nothing.
He taught moral obligation, on the basis of accountability to God. He
repudiated expediency as the guide in life, and fell back on the
principles of eternal right. As an ethical writer he was profounder and
more enlightened than Paley. He did not seek to overturn the popular
religion, like Grecian Sophists, only (like Socrates) to overturn
ignorance, before a sound foundation could be laid for any system of
truth. Nor did he ridicule religion, as Lucian did in after-times, but
soared to comprehend it, like the esoteric priests of Egypt in the time
of Moses or Pythagoras. He cherished as lofty views of God and his moral
government as any moralist of antiquity. And all these lofty views he
taught in matchless language,--principles of government, principles of
law, of ethics, of theology, giving consolation not only to the men of
his day, but to Christian sages in after-times. And there is nothing
puerile or dreamy or demoralizing in his teachings; they all are
luminous for learning as well as genius. He rivalled Bacon in the
variety and profundity of his attainments. He gloried in the certitudes
which consciousness reveals, as well as in the facts which experience
and history demonstrate. With these he consoled himself in trouble; on
these he reposed in the hour of danger. Like Pascal he meditated on the
highest truths which task the intellect of man, but, unlike him, did not
disdain those weapons which _reason_ forged, and which no one used more
triumphantly than Pascal himself. And these great meditations he
transmitted for all ages to ponder, as among the most precious of the
legacies of antiquity.

Thus did he live, a shining light in a corrupt and godless age, in spite
of all the faults which modern critics have enlarged upon in their