he who fears nothing, but goes at every thing, comes to be rash. In like manner, too, he that tastes of every pleasure and abstains from none, comes to lose all selfcontrol; while he who avoids all, as do the dull and clownish, comes as it were to lose his faculties of perception : that is to say, the habits of perfected Self-Mastery and Courage are spoiled by the excess and defect, but by the mean state are preserved.

Furthermore, not only do the origination, growth, and marring of the habits come from and by the same circumstances, but also the acts of working after the habits are formed will be exercised on the same: for so it is also with those other things which are more directly matters of sight, strength for instance: for this comes by taking plenty of food and doing plenty of work, and the man who has attained strength is best able to do these: and so it is with the Virtues, for not only do we by abstaining from pleasures come to be perfected in Self-Mastery, but when we have come to be so we can best abstain from them: similarly too with courage: for it is by accustoming ourselves to despise objects of fear and stand up against them that we come to be brave; and after we have come to be so we shall be best able to stand up against such objects.

And for a test of the formation of the habits we must take the pleasure or pain which succeeds the acts; for he is perfected in Self-Mastery who not only abstains from the bodily pleasures but is glad to do so; whereas he who abstains but is sorry to do it has not Self-Mastery: he again is brave who stands up against danger either with positive pleasure or at least without any pain; whereas he who does it with pain is not brave.

There are principally three things moving us to choice, and three to avoidance, the honourable, the expedient, the

pleasant; and their three contraries, the dishonourable, the hurtful, and the painful; now the good man is apt to go right, and the bad man wrong, with respect to all these of course, but most specially with respect to pleasure: because not only is this common to him with all animals, but also it is a concomitant of all those things which move to choice, since both the honourable and the expedient give an impression of pleasure.

That Moral Virtue is a mean state, and how it is so, and that it lies between two faulty states, one in the way of excess and another in the way of defect, and that it is so because it has an aptitude to aim at the mean both in feelings and actions, all this has been set forth fully and sufficiently.

And so it is hard to be good for surely hard it is in each instance to find the mean, just as to find the mean point or centre of a circle is not what any man can do, but only he who knows how: just so to be angry, to give money, and be expensive, is what any man can do and easy but to do these to the right person, in due proportion, at the right time, with a right object, and in the right manner, this is not as before what any man can do nor is it easy and for this cause goodness is rare and praiseworthy and noble.

Therefore he who aims at the mean should make it his first care to keep away from that extreme which is more contrary than the other to the mean; just as Calypso in Homer advises Ulysses

"Clear of this smoke and surge thy barque direct; because of the two extremes the one is always more, and the other less erroneous: and, therefore, since to hit exactly on the mean is difficult, one must take the least of the evils as the safest plan; and this a man will be doing if he follows this method.

We ought also to take into consideration our own natural bias; which varies in each man's case and will be ascertained from the pleasure and pain arising in us. Furthermore, we should force ourselves off in the contrary direction, because we shall find ourselves in the mean after we have removed ourselves far from the wrong side, exactly as men do in straightening bent timber.

But in all cases we must guard most carefully against what is pleasant, and pleasure itself because we are not impartial judges of it.

We ought to feel in fact towards pleasure as did the old counsellors toward Helen, and in all cases pronounce a similar sentence: for so by sending it away from us we shall err the less.

Well, to speak very briefly, these are the precautions by adopting which we shall be best able to attain the

mean.

Still, perhaps, after all, it is a matter of difficulty, and especially in the particular instances: it is not easy, for instance, to determine exactly in what manner, with what persons, for what causes, and for what length of time, one ought to feel anger: for we ourselves sometimes praise those who are defective in this feeling, and we call them meek; at another we term the hot-tempered manly and spirited.

Then again, he who makes a small deflection from what is right, be it on the side of too much or too little, is not blamed, only he who makes a considerable one, for he cannot escape observation. But to what point or degree a man must err in order to incur blame it is not easy to determine exactly in words: nor in fact any of those points which are matter of perception by the Moral Sense: such questions are matters of detail and the decision of them rests with the Moral Sense.

At all events thus much is plain, that the mean state is in all things praiseworthy, and that practically we must deflect sometimes towards excess, sometimes towards defect, because this will be the easiest method of hitting on the mean, that is, on what is right.

ECCLESIASTICUS

(Second century before Christ.)

In his work on "Job and Solomon, or the Wisdom of the Old Testament," Professor Cheyne gives the following account of the Apocryphal book entitled "The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus: "The author was, beyond reasonable doubt, a contemporary of Simon the high priest, the son of Onias.' Now there were five high priests who bore the name of Simon or Simeon, two of whom, Simon I. (B. c. 310–290) and Simon II. (B. c. 219–199), have by different critics been thought of. The weight of argument is in favor of the second of the name, who was certainly the more important of the two, and who is referred to in the Talmud under the name of Simeon the Righteous. This is in accordance with the Greek translator's statement in his preface, that he was the grandson of the author, and we may conjecturally fix the composition of the book at about 180 B. C. The translator himself came into Egypt, as he tells us, in the 38th year of King Euergetes (comp. Luke xxii. 25). Now Euergetes II., Physkon, who must be here intended, began to reign jointly with his brother Philometer B. c. 170; his brother died B. c. 145, and he reigned alone for twenty-five years longer (till B. c. 116). Hence the translator's arrival in Egypt and possibly the translation itself fall within the year 132. The object of his work, we gather from the preface, was to correct the inequalities of moral and religious culture among the Jews of Egypt by setting before them a standard and a lesson book of true religious wisdom."