io6
The
Present State of Ethical Philosophy
philosophy never made such vast between Soc-
Unassisted
proficiency as at the time elapsing rates
and
Antoninus.
After
this
time
the
Christian religion comes in, supplying the defects and correcting the errors of morality, and establishing
on the whole a grander system
;
but
human
ingenuity alone never soared so high as the epoch we have marked. during From these philosophers, ethics were delivered
down
to the Christian fathers with all the
new motives and sanctions opened by revelation. With all their parade of schools and disputations, the fathers did little to settle the founda-
They wrote much about them, and collected the crude materials for others to
tions of morals.
analyze.
They endeavored
to
show
a contra-
of reason and revelation, and to substitute their expositions of the one for the
riety in the laws
plain dictates of the other.
of the monastic
which were the
Roman
cell,
and
But the obscurity narrow views
the
upon each succession of Priesthood, were unfavorable to
entailed
grand apprehensions of moral science.
Some