Letters to a Friend Author:Olinthus Gregory Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTER III. On the Opinions of the Heathens, their Legislators, Poets, and Philosophers, relative to God, to Moral Duty, and a Future State. It is not surp... more »rising, my dear Friend, that your philosophical companions should endeavour to persuade you, in opposition to the train of argument in my last letter, that unassisted reason not only can discover, but has discovered, all that is necessary to be known, as it regards our duty or our expectations. The powers of the intellect, notwithstanding their defects and their limitations, have doubtless done much in every department of art, of literature, and of science: and those who are best able to estimate the value of intellectual productions, are probably, for that very reason, apt to ascribe to the mind much more than it can really accomplish. Besides this, several of the philosophers who have indulged in moral speculations since the aera of the Christian revelation, and even those who have been the warmest opposers of that revelation, have derived, indirectly, from the source to which they would disdain to apply directly, many highly important truths, many valuable rules of conduct, many powerful incentives to virtue: they have thus travelled by a torch snatched from the temple of God, while both themselves and their followers idly imagine their path is illuminated by light of their own creating. Thus, thelater Platonists, Plotinus, Porphyry, Jamblichus, and Hierocles, are well known to have been pupils of Am- monius of Alexandria, a Christian, and the tutor of Origen: whence it happens that the Christian Fathers were accused of Platonizing; instead of which the truth is that the philosophers just mentioned filched from the Christian repository. But, to judge correctly in this respect, let us inquire what was effected in morals ...« less