that he was a slave or a captive of that

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name from the East, who brought much of the traditional wisdom of his own country with him into the West. But when all circumstances are considered, I think the former is the more probable opinion.

LETTER

LETTER XIII.

ON THE USE OF HEATHEN LEARNING.

IN the middle ages of the church many Christians were very shy of the heathen writers; they were afraid lest the heathen principles of religion, morality, and policy, should be imbibed together with their poetry and oratory, and corrupt the minds of their children and scholars. Much was said of what had happened to St. Jerom; that in a vision he dreamed he was severely scourged for reading Cicero. But St. Austin, who was a man of great devotion, and one of the first scholars of the church, assures us, that one of Cicero's pieces, inscribed to Hortensius, first gave him an appetite to a more divine sort of wisdom, and that he embraced Christianity in consequence of the sentiments which that treatise had raised in his mind. Basil, another great scholar of the church, and a man of unquestioned piety, recommended the prudent reading of profane authors to some young people under his tuition. After his example, therefore, I must advise you to read with prudence,

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and with a proper mixture of caution; not trusting yourself to the reasonings of profane writers, till you are well grounded in principles of truth; and then, as the bee can settle upon a poisonous flower without being hurt, and can even extract honey from it, so may you improve your talents for the highest purposes, and arm yourself more effectually for the defence of sacred truth, by studying profane orators, poets, and historians.

Writers are frequently rising up, with ill designs against your religion, who polish their style, and take the utmost pains to adorn it after the pattern of the best writers of antiquity. Some scholars will always be wanted on the other side, to turn the powers of composition against them; and truth will never fail to add such a force and weight to their embellishments, that the enemy will not be able to stand against them. He that reads the speech of St. Paul to King Agrippa, and considers it as a composition, will never be persuaded that cold and beggarly diction is requisite in a Christian apologist. The apostle, though a rigid Jew by his education, discovered on occasion a familiar acquaintance with 'the heathen poets.

LETTER

LETTER XIV.

ON THE CONSENT BETWEEN THE SCRIPTURES AND THE HEATHEN POETS.

SOME ingenious men, of more wit than experience, have objected to the Christian revelation, because they find no traces of it in their favourite classical writers. The testimony of an adversary is always valuable; but upon this occasion we have no reason to expect it from those who had their reasons for vilifying the Jews, and all that belonged to them. If we find any thing to our purpose, we must have it as it were by accident; and of this sort much may be collected.

You have began to read Horace. If you examine his third ode, you will see him confirming the Sacred History of the Scripture in some particulars not unworthy of your notice, which could be derived to the heathens only from the fountains of Divine Revelation, or from tradition proceeding from the same original. What can we understand by the audax Japeti genus, but the posterity of Japhet, that son of Noah, from whom the European na

tions are descended? Japhet was the first father of the Greeks and Romans after the flood, as surely as Adam was the father of all mankind. Then, what is Prometheus's fraud against Heaven, but that offence, whatever it was, which brought death into the world? Here we have a theft acknowleged against Heaven, and all manner of evils and diseases are sent upon earth in consequence of it:

Post ignem ætherea domo

Subductum, macies et nova febrium
Terris incubuit cohors.

And what is more remarkable, he tells us of the change which was made in the period of human life, with the reason of it;

Semotique prius tarda necessitas
Lethi corripuit gradum.

Here it is affirmed by implication, that death was originally at a greater distance, and that the divine justice shortened human life slowly and unwillingly, not till the increasing corruption of the world had made it necessary to lessen the opportunities of sin. The lives of men, before the flood, were of many hundred years; but when all flesh had corrupted his way, then the curse took place at the flood,

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