[Footnote 72: Maurice, _Philos. of the First Six Centuries_, p. 37. We venture specially to recommend this weighty and beautiful passage to the reader's serious attention.]
But perhaps some reader will say, What advantage, then, can we gain by studying in Pagan writers truths which are expressed more nobly, more clearly, and infinitely more effectually in our own sacred books? Before answering the question, let me mention the traditional anecdote[73] of the Caliph Omar. When he conquered Alexandria, he was shown its magnificent library, in which were collected untold treasures of literature, gathered together by the zeal, the labour, and the liberality of a dynasty of kings. "What is the good of all those books?" he said. "They are either in accordance with the Koran, or contrary to it. If the former they are superfluous; if the latter they are pernicious. In either case let them be burnt." Burnt they were, as legend tells; but all the world has condemned the Caliph's reasoning as a piece of stupid Philistinism and barbarous bigotry. Perhaps the question as to the _use_ of reading Pagan ethics is equally unphilosophical; at any rate, we can spare but very few words to its consideration. The answer obviously is, that God has spoken to men, [Greek: polymeros kai polytropos], "at sundry times and in divers manners," [74] with a richly variegated wisdom.[75] Sometimes He has taught truth by the voice of Hebrew prophets, sometimes by the voice of Pagan philosophers. And _all_ His voices demand our listening ear. If it was given to the Jew to speak with diviner insight and intenser power, it is given to the Gentile also to speak at times with a large and lofty utterance, and we may learn truth from men of alien lips and another tongue. They, too, had the dream, the vision, the dark saying upon the harp, the "daughter of a voice," the mystic flashes upon the graven gems. And such truths come to us with a singular force and freshness; with a strange beauty as the doctrines of a less brightly illuminated manhood; with a new power of conviction from their originality of form, which, because it is less familiar to us, is well calculated to arrest our attention after it has been paralysed by familiar repetitions. We cannot afford to lose these heathen testimonies to Christian truth; or to hush the glorious utterances of Muse and Sibyl which have justly outlived "the drums and tramplings of a hundred triumphs." We may make them infinitely profitable to us. If St. Paul quotes Aratus, and Menander, and Epimenides,[76] and perhaps more than one lyrical melody besides, with earnest appreciation,--if the inspired Apostle could both learn himself and teach others out of the utterances of a Cretan philosopher and an Attic comedian, we may be sure that many of Seneca's apophthegams would have filled him with pleasure, and that he would have been able to read Epictetus and Aurelius with the same noble admiration which made him see with thankful emotion that memorable altar TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.