slave."

Sec. L. All this is exceedingly beautiful, so far as it reaches; but
the Christian divines were grievously led astray by their endeavors to
reconcile this system with the nobler law of love. At first, as in the
passage I am just going to quote from St. Ambrose, they tried to graft
the Christian system on the four branches of the Pagan one; but finding
that the tree would not grow, they planted the Pagan and Christian
branches side by side; adding, to the four cardinal virtues, the three
called by the schoolmen theological, namely, Faith, Hope, and Charity:
the one series considered as attainable by the Heathen, but the other by
the Christian only. Thus Virgil to Sordello:

"Loco e laggiu, non tristo da martiri
Ma di tenebre solo, ove i lamenti
Non suonan come guai, ma son sospiri:

* * * * *

Quivi sto io, con quei che le tre sante
Virtu non si vestiro, e senza vizio
Conobbei l' altre, e seguir, tutte quante."

. . . . . "There I with those abide
Who the Three Holy Virtues put not on,
But understood the rest, and without blame
Followed them all."

CARY.

Sec. LI. This arrangement of the virtues was, however, productive of
infinite confusion and error: in the first place, because Faith is
classed with its own fruits,--the gift of God, which is the root of the
virtues, classed simply as one of them; in the second, because the words
used by the ancients to express the several virtues had always a
different meaning from the same expressions in the Bible, sometimes a
more extended, sometimes a more limited one. Imagine, for instance, the
confusion which must have been introduced into the ideas of a student
who read St. Paul and Aristotle alternately; considering that the word
which the Greek writer uses for Justice, means, with St. Paul,
Righteousness. And lastly, it is impossible to overrate the mischief
produced in former days, as well as in our own, by the mere habit of
reading Aristotle, whose system is so false, so forced, and so
confused, that the study of it at our universities is quite enough to
occasion the utter want of accurate habits of thought which so often
disgraces men otherwise well-educated. In a word, Aristotle mistakes the
Prudence or Temperance which must regulate the operation of the virtues,
for the essence of the virtues themselves; and, striving to show that
all virtues are means