to, Brutus, and
Cassius, carried the means of self-destruction about them, that they
might not fall alive into the hands of their enemies.

The daily lives of these wisest of the heathen corresponded to their
teachings, so far at least as vice was concerned. The most notorious
vices, and even unnatural crimes, were practiced by them. The reader of
the classics does not need to be reminded that such vices are lauded in
the poems of Ovid, and Horace, and Virgil; that the poets were rewarded
and honored for songs which would not be tolerated for a moment in the
vilest theater of New York.

Recently some daily papers and broad-church preachers have taken to the
canonization of heathen saints; they denounce vigorously the bigotry of
any who will not open to them the gates of heaven, or who will, in
general, deny salvation to good heathens. But we do not deny salvation
to good heathens, or to good Jews, or to good Mohammedans, or to anybody
who is good. God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation, he
that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of him. Nor are
we about to usurp Peter's keys, and lock anybody out of heaven, or into
it either; we are only acting as jurymen upon the life and conduct of
men held up to our children as noble examples of a good life, in their
classics, by heathens like themselves, and recommended now by Christian
clergymen, as fitter for the kingdom of God, than bad Christians; which
last may be very true, and so much the worse for the bad Christians. But
the question is not to be thus decided by comparisons, or by
generalities; we must have specified individual heathen saints. When,
however, we come to look for them, these saints and heroes prove to be
only fit for the penitentiary, according to the laws of any of our
States; and were they living now, and behaving themselves according to
their accustomed habits, the best of them would be fortunate if they got
there before they were tarred and feathered by an outraged public.
Socrates, Seneca, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, form the stock
specimens trotted out of the stables of heathen morality, for the
admiration and reverence of Christians in this nineteenth century. But
it has been well remarked of Socrates, that no American lady would live
with him a year without applying for a divorce, and getting it, too,
upon very sufficient grounds. Seneca, who wrote so beautifully upon
morals, was an adulterer; and, moreover, prostitute