This hardcover book was published in 1891 by Macmillan and Company with 408 pages. Ex-library copy. The text is unmarked. The binding is sound though the hinges are weakening. The corners are bumped with the tips rubbed through. Library treatments include call letters on the spine, library bookplate, card pocket. The majority of the leaves are uncut (page 25 on). Pages 395-398 have a closed tear starting at mid-foredge and continuining about mid-page. PREFACE The essays which are collected in this small volume are in part fragments of a design which I formed very early in life. It seemed to me that a careful examInation of the religious teaching of representative prophetic masters of the West, if I may use the phrase, would help towards a better understanding of the power of the Christian Creed. Their hopes and their desires, their errors and their silences, were likely, I thought, to shew how far the Gospel satisfies our natural aspirations and illuminates dark places in our experience. The expectation unless I am mistaken, will be found to be justified even by those isolated and imperfect sketches. If the student will extend the same method of inquiry, as I had hoped to do, to Homer, Heraclitus, Virgil, Epictetus, Plotinus-to name the men from whom I believe we may gain most-he will learn, as perhaps he can learn in no other way, what the apostolic message is as a revelation, a revelation not in thought but in life. It may seem to be a paradox- it ought to be a truism- that the Aeneid is the Roman Gospel. The poem gives the ideal of the national religious hero; and few things are more surprising, in the histories of the apostolic age than that Virgil finds no place in the popular estimate of the influences at work in moulding or expressing current opinion.To the Essays on Plato, lAeschylus, Euripides, Origen and Dionysius, originally published in the Contemporary Review (1866, 1867, 1878, 1883), which formed part of my original design I have added four others which illustrate the general thought which is suggested by them. The Faith welcomes all truth, while it supplements external lessons by its own peculiar witness, and places partial and limited expressions of truth in their right relations to one another and to the whole. Nothing lies outside the influence of its transfiguring power. Splendid visions .; burst upon us from unexpected quarters, and we find that they are included in that view of GOD the world and man which lies in the fact of the Incarnation.It is now about five-and-twenty years since the have passed since the Essay was written. Certainly in the days which passed since no call to effort has grown fainter and no prospect less bright. If it wass possible then to make our own the memorable phrase with which Socrates closed his summons to a life of faith, it has been brought home to us in the interval once and again by those who have proved to the last struggle of life that the Word for which Plato longed, as a sure support, has been given to us in Him Whom St. John has made known.B.F.D. Aucland CastleJan. 27, 1891